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1 



MAN UAL 



ENGLISH LITERATURE, 



BY- 

HENRY MORLEY, 
»\ 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, 
LONDON. 



WITH AN ENTIRE RE-ARRANGEMENT OF MATTER, AND WITH 
NUMEROUS RETRENCHMENTS AND ADDITIONS, 



MOSES COIT TYLER, 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY 
OF MICHIGAN. 









NEW YORK: 
SHELDON AND COMPANY. 

1879. 






VALUABLE TEXTBOOKS 




Avery's Natural Philosophy . 

Hill's Elements of fflieloric and Composition. 

Hill's Science of Phetoric. 

SJiaw's New History of English and American 
literature. 

Al den's Science of Government. 

Haven's Me?ital and Moral P/iilosophy \ 

Tfayland's Intellectual 'Philosophy and Moral 
Scie7ice. 

Wayland's Political Hconomy. 

Jitst revised by ^President Chapin of Seloit College. 

Hooker's JVe?v Physiology . 

loomis's Physiology and Geology. 

long's Classical Atlas. 

laird's Classical Manual. 

Professor Olney's Arithmetics and Higher Math- 
ematics. 



Copyright, 1879, Sheldon & Co. 



Electrotyped by Rand, Avey LC Control Number 




tmp96 031560 



2?? 



PREFACE. 
Id 



This volume may be described as an evolution from " A First 
Sketch of English Literature," written by Professor Henry 
Morley of London, and first published there in 1873. Not- 
withstanding its title, that book is by no means a slight affair : 
it has, in fact, upwards of nine hundred closely-printed pages ; 
and its rather self-depreciatory name was given to it, doubtless, 
in consideration of the larger and more elaborate account of 
English literature on which its author has been engaged during 
the past twenty years, and of which three notable portions 
have been already issued. 

In spite of some disadvantages in its construction, the 
" First Sketch of English Literature " is, for fulness of 
learning and for vigor and wholesomeness of thought, prob- 
ably the best book of the kind hitherto produced in our lan- 
guage. It seems to have been intended as a text-book for 
college-students in England. However well it may be suited 
to the methods and conditions of English studies there, it has 
certain peculiarities that hinder its successful use b} T students 
in this county. Under the sanction of Professor Morley's 
courteous and generous consent, I have undertaken to make 
such changes in the book as my own acquaintance with it in the 
class-room had suggested to me as being the most desirable. 

It is, of course, due to Professor Morley, that he should have, 



IV PREFACE. 

if possible, no responsibility except for his own part in this 
Manual ; and I have tried to express, even upon the title-page, 
the nature of the changes which his " First Sketch " has under- 
gone at my hands. The precise range and detail of those 
changes, however, it is impossible for me fully to point out, 
either upon the title-page or here. 

In general, I maj T sa\- that the substance of this Manual is 
Professor Morley's, and that the construction of it is mine. 
Even with reference to the substance of the book, however, I 
ought to explain that it differs in many respects from the 
" First Sketch." I have retained from that work the essential 
part of every thing bearing directly upon English literature ; 
but I have tried to leave out every thing whose relation to 
English literature was either indirect, or, for American readers, 
bewildering : such as, on the one hand, extended references to 
Italian, French, and Spanish literatures ; or, on the other hand, 
a multitude of. incidental allusions — genealogical, domestic, 
local, and titular — that would perplex no student in England, 
but are sure to perplex most students in America. But my 
changes in the substance of the ' ' First Sketch ' ' have not 
been confined to those of omission. Wherever I thought it 
desirable, I have freely added materials not in the original 
work : for example, all of the Introduction excepting the first 
section ; several pages of the chapters on the fifteenth centuiy ; 
the larger part of the account of the nineteenth century ; 
besides many of the paragraphs of introduction and transition 
scattered through the book. But the most of my work upon 
the substance of this Manual cannot be here specified ; it 
consists of innumerable small bits of alteration and addition, 
fitted in and mixed up with the original materials, and no 
longer distinguishable from them except by a careful collation 
of the two books item bv item. 



PREFACE. V 

In a large book like this — a book of minute historical, 
biographical, and bibliographical statement — the liability to 
errors in dates, names, quotations, and other small details, is 
something enormous. My endeavor to detect all inaccuracies 
whatsoever to be found in the materials which compose the 
present work has cost an amount of labor and anxiety that 
would hardly be imagined, except b}' those who know from ex- 
perience what it is to go through, sentence by sentence, a book 
of this sort, and try to verify every fact asserted or implied in 
it. As the book now stands, it will be found, I think, far more 
trustworth}', even in this sacred matter of precision in small 
things, than most other works of the kind. Yet I know that, 
in spite of all my effort to keep them out, some inaccuracies 
must still have crept into the book ; and I shall be exceedingly 
grateful to any reader who will kindly notify me of any error, 
whether large or small, which he may discover in it. 

In the citation of book-titles, many of which, especially in 
the times before the eighteenth century, are long and diffuse, 
Professor Morlej', in his tk First Sketch," has followed a custom 
which has hitherto prevailed in such books, and which may per- 
haps be adapted to the convenience of the general reader, but 
which is not strictly scientific ; he has often given, in quotation- 
points but without signs of ellipsis, only the leading words of a 
title : thus, " Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," instead of 
; ' The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faus- 
tus." Moreover, in the spelling of old book-titles, his usage is 
not uniform, even for the same period, even for the same au- 
thor ; some titles are given in the antique spelling, others are 
modernized in part, and still others are modernized altogether. 
I confess that while for the ordinary uses of a text-book these 
methods of citation ma}' be sufficient, and do certainly corre- 
spond to the common practice, I regret their adoption by Pro- 



VI PREFACE. 

fessor Moiiev in his ''First Sketch;" and in my revision of 
that book, I began with the purpose of transforming all titles 
according to a fixed standard x)f precise and full citation. I 
was, however, soon forced to give up the attempt, as involving 
an amount of labor that I could not bestow upon the book ; and 
I have contented nryself with verifying every title — which I 
had the means of verifying at all — with respect to its accord- 
ance with the sense of the original. 

In passing from the substance of this Manual to its construc- 
tion, my task of explanation is made eas}\ For this portion 
of the work, I alone am responsible. Any one who will take 
the " First Sketch " and compare it with this Manual, with ref- 
erence to the arrangement of materials into literary epochs, 
into chapters, into subordinate topics under chapters, and even 
in many cases into paragraphs under subordinate topics, will 
see that in all these particulars the Manual is a new book. 

The disadvantages that I have observed as attending the use 
of the " First Sketch "as a text-book seemed to me largely to 
grow out of peculiarities in its construction. It is a mass of 
rich and various learning upon English literature, but densely 
packed together in small uniform type, with chapters very few 
and very long, with meagre indication at the head of each chap- 
ter respecting its contents, with no charts of periods and of the 
authors belonging to each period, with no analytic table of con- 
tents at the beginning, and with no analytic index at the end. 
It is lacking in perspective ; in sharp and obvious divisions of 
the great departments of the subject ; in such an adjustment of 
materials under these departments as to separate the essential 
from the non-essential, the more important from the less impor- 
tant ; in paragraphs of transition that may give to the student, 
in the right places, a clew to the spirit and drift of what is 
coming, and to its relations with what has just gone. Further- 



PREFACE. Vll 

more, the narrative of English authors which it presents is told 
synchronistically and in fragments, — each of the principal 
authors being dealt with for a single stage of his career, then 
giving wa}' to some contemporary author, and to another, and 
another, the first one then returning, and again giving way, 
and again returning, and so on, until the end of his career is 
reached. For the general reader, provided that he is already 
acquainted with the principal personages in English literature, 
and can thus witness, without forgetfulness or confusion, this 
flitting appearance and disappearance and re-appearance of 
names along the pages, such a method of narrating literary his- 
tor}' is both interesting and helpful ; it especially gives him a 
vivid sense of the actual contemporaneousness of authors in 
each group, and of the mutual entanglements and reciprocations 
of their lives. But for the average college-student, even though 
tolerabh* advanced in literary knowledge, the case is very dif- 
ferent : the vast majority of these once famous names are new 
and strange to him ; their separate individuality cannot easily 
be grasped and remembered hy him ; and after some scores of 
them have flitted in and out before his vision, he finds it hard to 
collect around each name the facts pertaining to it as the}' lie 
dispersed over so man} r pages ; he begins to get the wrong man 
into the right place, or the right man into the wrong place ; 
and finally, unless supported by uncommon help from his 
teacher, he is in danger of surrendering to discouragement and 
disgust. 

It is perhaps needless to say that all these disadvantages in 
the construction of the original work, I have endeavored to 
remove by an entirely new combination both of the old and of 
the new materials that have gone into the present work. In- 
stead of the presentation of the careers of authors synchronis- 
tically and in fragments, they are, with the exception of two or 



Vlll PREFACE. 

three names, here presented in wholes, — contemporary authors 
being carefully grouped together, but each author having the 
privilege of telling his whole story through before another one 
gets the floor. Moreover, the twelve centuries of English 
literature are here broken into natural and manageable periods, 
as explained in the Introduction; each of these periods is 
boldly marked off from the others by subordinate title-pages 
and by conspicuous charts of names ; in the exposition of each 
period, authors are grouped together in such manner as to give 
most prominence to those who are most important ; and by the 
familiar device of using t} T pe of different sizes, the student is 
easily guided to those portions of the narrative which, for the 
immediate purpose of the recitation, deserve his chief atten- 
tion, while, also, space is thus gained for materials that will be 
valuable to him for illustration and for subsequent reference. 

With respect to the proportion of parts in this work, there is 
one peculiarity about which I venture to offer a suggestion, 
especially to my fellow-teachers. Here are twelve centuries of 
English literature to be dealt with. In any proper account of 
these twelve centuries, how much space should be given to each 
centuiy? Nothing can be plainer than that, in a wise and 
helpful treatment of such a subject, some centuries should be 
unfolded with greater detail than others ; and that the most 
help should be given to the student upon just those centuries 
on which the most help is needed, — that is, upon those centu- 
ries respecting which the materials within his reach are likely 
to be the most scanty, as well as the most difficult to handle. 
It will be safe to say, I suppose, that, wherever this Manual 
shall be used, there will be sufficient materials for studying the 
literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ; namely, 
the works of the leading authors of those times, together with 
many periodicals and books in review of them. But for the 



PREFACE. IX 

ten centuries of English literature prior to the eighteenth, the 
materials in most American libraries are far less abundant, and 
from many of them are to a lamentable extent wanting. 

Accordingly, in this Manual — which herein retains the gen- 
eral plan adopted in the ' ' First Sketch ' ' — the first ten centu- 
ries are treated with the greater fulness of detail ; while, begin- 
ning with the eighteenth century, and coming down to the very 
border of the present year, the narrative, though embracing a 
still larger throng of names, grows less and less minute, and 
becomes finally a mere outline, — guiding the student, indeed, 
to all the great forms of recent English literature, and to the 
names of the chief writers who have illustrated each form, but 
leaving to the student the pleasure and the gain of filling in 
the sketch by studies which he can easily make for himself, and 
in which he will be sure to reap an ample reward both in knowl- 
edge and in delight. 

It is of the utmost importance, even in the use of a text- 
book on English literature, that students should be saved from 
lapsing into a passive and listless attitude toward the subject, 
and should be so skilfully steered in their work that they may 
come to know for themselves the exhilaration of original re- 
search. If I ma}' refer to my own experience as a teacher, 
I would say that in my introductory course upon English 
literature — in which course only do I use a text-book — I have 
found it a great advantage, while my pupils were engaged in 
reciting from the text-book upon the earlier periods of English 
literature, to parcel out among them, for direct study in the 
librae, the most celebrated works in prose and poetry belong- 
ing to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries ; 
with the understanding that each student, in his turn, is to 
have the opportunit}' of reporting upon the topic assigned to 
him, as it shall be reached by the class in the regular process 



X PREFACE. 

of the work. For some such method, this Manual is particu- 
larly adapted. 

It is my earnest hope that this book may prove to be the 
means — among others developed originally in this country, as 
well as drawn hither from England, France, and Germany — 
of giving a healthy impulse and guidance to the study of 
English literature in America ; and it has occurred to me that 
many readers of the present volume may be glad to have here 
a few words respecting the noble-minded English scholar and 
writer to whom they are chiefly indebted for it. 

Henry Morley was born in London in 1822, and received his 
education at the Moravian school of Neuwied-on-the-Rhine, and 
at King's College, London. In 1844, at Madeley, in Shrop- 
shire, he began professional life as a physician. After four 
years of medical practice, he yielded to the strong bent of his 
nature toward educational work, and established near Liverpool 
a school to be conducted on an original method, which proved 
very successful, and of which he subsequently published a de- 
scription. In 1851, he reluctantly abandoned this school, in 
order to enter upon an active literary career in London. He at 
once became associated with Charles Dickens in the editorial 
management of " Household Words," and so continued for six 
years. Near the end of that time, he joined the staff of " The 
Examiner," of which he was the editor-in-chief from 1859 to 

1864. Two years before he attained the latter position, he also 
became lecturer on English literature in King's College. In 

1865, he was made professor of English literature in University 
College, London, — his immediate predecessors in that office 
being David Masson and Arthur Hugh Clough. He still retains 
his professorship in University College ; but, in 1870, he added 
to its duties those of examiner in English language, literature, 
and history, to the University of London. 



PREFACE. XI 

During this long period of activity, first as physician, then as 
educator and journalist, he has likewise been a diligent student, 
and a prolific writer. The versatility of his literary labors is 
something notable. His interest in questions relating to sani- 
tnvy science has been shown in many separate papers upon the 
subject, and especially in two books : " Tracts upon Health for 
Cottage Circulation," 1847; and "How to Make Home Un- 
healthy," 1850. In poetry, and in prose fiction, he has pub- 
lished "The Dream of the Lily Bell," 1845; "Sunrise in 
Italy," 1847; and two volumes of " Fairy-Tales, " 1859 and 
1860. In biograplry, his publications are man}' and important : 
"Life of Bernard Paliss}' of Saintes," two volumes, 1852; 
'• Life of Jerome Cardan," 1854; "Life of Henry Cornelius 
Agrippa," 1856; "Clement Marot, and Other Studies," 1871. 
In 1851, his attention to certain educational problems was 
shown in a book entitled " A Defence of Ignorance." In 1866, 
he compressed into a book his special work as a dramatic critic : 
" The Journal of a London PL^ygoer from 1857 to 1866." 

It is, however, in the immense field of English literary his- 
tory and criticism that his special work has lain ; and in this 
field, also, he takes eminent rank among living English authors, 
both for the range and minuteness of his researches, and for the 
value of the books which those researches have enabled him to 
produce. Besides his " First Sketch of English Literature," he 
has published " Gossip and Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair," 
1857; "The Spectator," original and corrected texts, with 
introduction and notes, 1868 ; " Tables of English Literature," 
and "Notes of Literature," 1870; "Shorter English Poems, 
from the Earliest Period to the Present Time," "Illustrations 
of English Religion," and "The English Drama," — the last 
three books having appeared within the last two or three years. 
All of these works, numerous and extended as many of them 



Xll PREFACE. 

are, may be regarded as but incidental productions when com- 
pared with the one great literary task of his life, expressed in 
his " English Writers." Of this work, Vol. I., Part I., "The 
Celts and Anglo-Saxons," and Vol. I., Part II., "From the 
Conquest to Chaucer," appeared in 1864 ; while Vol. II., Part 
I., " From Chaucer to Dunbar," appeared in 1867. 

I must not close this Preface without recording here some 
grateful, even if inadequate, mention of the painstaking and 
generous assistance I have received, while this book has been 
passing through the press, from my friend and associate, Pro- 
fessor. Isaac N. Demmon. In many important ways the book 
has been improved by his good taste, his trained literary judg- 
ment, and his wide and accurate scholarship. 

Moses Coit Tyler. 
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 
June 3, 1879. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUCTION. 

1. English Literature and the English People. — 2. Their Conti- 
nuity for Twelve Hundred Years. — 3. Periods in English 
Literature 1 



PART I. 
PERIOD OF FIRST ENGLISH, OR ANGLO-SAXON : 

670-1066. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE FORMING OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 

1. The Earliest Europeans. — 2. The Celts. —3. The Teutons.— 
4. Their Blending into the English People. — 5. Traits con- 
tributed by the Celts. — 6. Traits contributed by the Teutons . 7 

CHAPTER II. 

FIRST ENGLISH POETRY. 

1. The Long Line of English Poets. — 2. Caedmon. — 3. His Para- 
phrase. — 4. Beowulf. — 5. Aldhelm. — 6. Other Poets. — 7. 
Mechanism of First English Verse . . . . . .13 

CHAPTER III. 

FIRST ENGLISH PROSE. 

1. The Venerable Bede. — 2. Alcuin and John Scotus Erigena. — 3. 
King Alfred. — 4. Ethelwold and Dunstan. — 5. Progress in 
England. —6. JSlfric. — 7. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . .22 



xiv CONTENTS. 

PAKT II. 

PERIOD OF TRANSITIONAL ENGLISH : 

1066-1350. 

CHAPTER I. 

WRITINGS OP ENGLISHMEN IN LATIN AND IN FRENCH. 

1. The English Language before and afW the Norman Conquest. 

— 2. Writings in Latin and in French. — 3. Chronicles. — 
4. William of Malmesbury. — 5. Geoffrey of Monmouth. — 6. 
Wace. — 7. A Group of Minor Chroniclers. — 8. Ralph Higden. 

— 9. Romances; Walter Map. — 10. Other Romance- Writers. 
— 11. Saewulf. — 12. Hilarius. — 13. Miracle-Plays and Mys- 
teries. — 14. Writers on Science ; Athelard of Bath. — 15. 
Alexander Neckham. — 16. Roger Bacon. — 17. Writers on 
Law; Ralph Glanville; Henry of Bracton. — 18. Religious 
Discussion; English Debate concerning Authority. — 19. Nigel 
Wireker. — 20. Robert Grosseteste. —21. Richard de Bury . 33 

CHAPTER II. 

WRITINGS IN. THE ENGLISH OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD. 

1. State of English Literature in this Period. — 2. Layamon. — 3. 
Orm. — 4. Nicholas of Guildford ; Devotional and Moral Writ- 
ings ; Romances ; Ancren Riwle. — 5. Robert of Gloucester and 
his Contemporaries. — 6. Robert of Brunne. — 7. Laurence 
Minot. — 8. Richard Rojle. —9. Dan Michel. — 10. Ralph Hig- 
den and English Miracle Plays. — 11. The Chester Plays. — 12. 
The Shepherds' Play. — 13. The Modern Drama ... 60 



PART III. 

PERIOD OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH : 

1350-1550. 

CHAPTER I. 

SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY : CHAUCER. 

1. Chaucer's English. —2. Chaucer's Parentage and Birth-Year. — 
3. His Education. —4. His Training for Poetry. —5. His 



CONTENTS. XV 

Translations of " Le Roman de la Rose" and Boethius. — 6. 
" The Court of Love." — 7. Chaucer's Stanza. — 8. " The As- 
sembly of Foules." — 9. " Complaint of the Black Knight." — 
10. Chaucer's Military Career. — 11. His "Dream." — 12. 
"Book of the Duchess." — 13. His Political Life. —14. Sec- 
ond Period of his Literary Life; "Troilus and Cressida." — 
15. "House of Fame." — 16. "Legend of Good Women." — 
17. His Further Political Life. — 18. "The Flower and the 
Leaf." — 19. "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." —20. His 
Political Life continued; "The Astrolabe." — 21. His Last 
Years. — 22. "Canterbury Tales." — 23. His so-called Spuri- 
ous Writings 75 

CHAPTER II. 

SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY : CHAUCER'S LITE- 
RARY CONTEMPORARIES. 

1. John Gower; hisBalades; " Speculum Meditantis;" " Vox Cla- 
ruantis;" " Confessio Amantis;" his Later Years; "Tripar- 
tite Chronicle." — 2." William Langland; "The Vision of 
Piers Ploughman;" Imitations of it. — 3. John Barbour; 
"Bruce." — 4. Sir John Mandeville; "Travels." — 5. John 
Wiclif. — 6. John Trevisa; "Translation of Higden's Poly- 
chronicon." — 7. Ralph Strode 99 

CHAPTER III. 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY : POETS. 

1. Intellectual Character of the Fifteenth Century. — 2. Develop- 
ment of the English Language and of English Style ; Reserved 
Energies. — 3. John Lydgate. — 4. Thomas Occleve. — 5. 
James I. of Scotland. — 6. Minor Poets. — 7. Ballads . . 113 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY : PROSE- WRITERS. 

1. Literary Use of Latin. — 2. Reginald Pecock. — 3. Sir John 
Fortescue. — 4. William Caxton. — 5. Sir Thomas Malory. — 
6. John Tiptoft; Anthony Woodville 125 

CHAPTER V. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY : PROSE- WRITERS. 

1. Characters of the English Monarchs. — 2. The New Learning 
and its Chief Promoters. — 3. Sir Thomas More. — 4. Henry 



XVI CONTENTS. 

VIII. as an Author. — 5. Hugh Latimer. — 6. William Tyn- 
dal. — 7. Other English Translators of the Bible. — 8. Chroni- 
clers in Latin. — 9. Chroniclers in English; John Bellenden; 
Robert Fabyan ; Edward Hall ; Lord Berners's Froissart. — 10. 
JohnLeland. — 11. Sir Thomas Elyot 183 



CHAPTER VI. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY : POETRY AND THE 
DRAMA. 

1. John Skelton. — 2. William Dunbar. — 3. Gavin Douglas. — 4. 
Sir David Lindsay of the Mount. — 5. Sir Thomas Wyatt. — 
6. Earl of Surrey. — 7. Alexander Barclay. — 8. Stephen 
Hawes. — 9. William Roy. — 10. Scottish Hymns. — 11. The 
Drama; the Morality-Play. — 12. Skelton's "Magnificence." 
— 13. Lindsay's Satire on the Three Estates. — 14. Rise of the 
Modern Drama. — 15. The First Comedy; Nicholas Udall. — 
16. Masques. — 17. Interludes ; John Heywood . . . 151 



PART IV. 

PERIOD OF MODERN ENGLISH. 

1550 to the Present. 

CHAPTER I. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: ENGLISH WRITERS 

OF LATIN ; ENGLISH TRANSLATORS ; WRITERS OF RELIGIOUS 

AND THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

1. Approach of the Elizabethan Era in Literature. — 2. Classical 
Study. — 3. Writers of Books in Latin ; Sir John Cheke and 
Sir Thomas Smith. —4. Other Writers in Latin. —5. George 
Buchanan. — 6. The Translators from Greek, Latin, Italian, 
and French; Phaer; Twyne; Golding; Turberville; Brooke; 
Paynter; North; Stanihurst; Hall; Googe; Florio; Haring- 
ton; Carew; Fairfax; Savile; Sylvester. — 7. Religious Writ- 
ings; Whittingham; the Geneva Bible; the Bishops' Bible.— 
8. John Knox.— 9. John Fox. — 10. Stephen Gosson. — 11. 
Philip Stubbes. — 12. Richard Hooker ISO 



CONTENTS. XV11 

CHAPTER II. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY : ASCHAM, LYLY, 
SIDNEY, AND OTHER WRITERS OF SECULAR PROSE. 

1. Koger Ascham. — 2. John Lyly. — 3. Sir Philip Sidney. — 4. 
Literary History and Criticism; John Bale; William Webbe; 
George Puttenham. — 5. Literary Anthologies; John Boden- 
ham; Francis Meres. — 6. History and Biography; George 
Cavendish; Richard Grafton; John Stow; Ralph Holinshed. 

— 7. Books of Travel; Sir Humphrey Gilbert; Thomas Hariot; 
Richard Hakluyt 208 

CHAPTER III. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY : POETRY AND THE 

DRAMA. 

1. Poetical Miscellanies. — 2. Devotional Poetry; Parker; Stern- 
hold and Hopkins. — 3. Thomas Tusser. — 4. Thomas Sack- 
ville. — 5. "A Mirror for Magistrates." — 6. Nicholas Grimald. 

— 7. Thomas Churchyard. — 8. George Turbervile. — 9. 
George Gascoigne. — 10. Gabriel Harvey. — 11. Edmund Spen- 
ser. — 12. Fulke Greville. — 13. George Whetstone. — 14. 
Thomas Watson. — 15. William Warner. — 16. Henry Con- 
stable and Robert Southwell. — 17. Sir John Davies. — 18. 
First English Tragedy. — 19. Translations of Latin Tragedies. 

— 20. Development of the Drama in England ; Richard Ed- 
wards; Actors and Theatres. — 21. Thomas Lodge. — 22. An- 
thony Munday. — 23. The Writers of Plays. — 24. George 
Peele. — 25. John Lyly. — 26. Robert Greene. — 27. Henry 
Chettle.— 28. Thomas Kyd. —29. Thomas Nash. —30. Chris- 
topher Marlowe 227 

CHAPTER IV. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : DRAMATIC LITERA- 
TURE : SHAKESPEARE, HIS CONTEMPORARIES, AND IMMEDIATE 
SUCCESSORS. 

1. English Writers in the Early Years of the Century. — 2. William 
Shakespeare. — 3. Ben Jonson. — 4. Beaumont and Fletcher. 

— 5. George Chapman; Thomas Heywood. — 6. Thomas Mid- 
dleton. — 7. Thomas Dekker. — 8. John Marston. — 9. William 
Alexander. — 10. Cyril Tourneur. — 11. William Rowley. — 12. 
Nathaniel Field. —13. Philip Massinger; John Webster. — 14. 
John Ford ; James Shirley. — 15. Thomas May. — 16. Jasper 
Mayne. — 17. Thomas Randolph. — 18. Sir William Dave- 
nant 275 



XV111 ION TENTS. 

CHAPTER V. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : POETRY CHIEFLY 
NON- DRAMATIC. 

1. Samuel Daniel. — 2. Michael Drayton. — 3. William Browne. — 
4. Giles Fletcher; Phineas Fletcher. — 5. George Wither. — 6. 
William Drummond. — 7. Later Euphuism in Poetry. — 8. 
John Donne. — 9. Thomas Coryat ; John Taylor. — 10. Fran- 
cis Quarles. — 11. George Herbert. — 12. Richard Crashaw. — 
13. Character Poetry ; Overbury; Habington; Earle. — 14. The 
Translators; George Chapman; George Sandys; Barten Holy- 
day. — 15. Wits, Satirists, and Song-Writers; Joseph Hall. — 
16. Sir John Harington. — 17. Richard Corbet. — 18. John 
Cleveland. — 19. Thomas Carew. — 20. Sir John Denham. — 
21. Sir John Suckling. — 22. William Cartwright. — 23. Rich- 
ard Lovelace. — 24. Robert Herrick. — 25. The Position of John 
Milton in Literature ; His Earlier Poetry 302 



CHAPTER VI. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : SCHOLARS, HISTORI- 
ANS, AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 
V 

1. Learned Men; James I. — 2. Cotton and Bodley. — 3. Robert 
Burton. — 4. Lancelot Andrewes. — 5. James Usher. — 6. John 
Selden. —7. Sir Henry Wotton; John Hales. — 8. John Light- 
foot. — 9. Sir Henry Spelman. — 10. John Hayward. — 11. Wil- 
liam Camden. — 12. Historians ; John Speed. — 13. Samuel 
Purchas. — 14. Sir Walter Raleigh. — 15. Richard Knolles; 
Alexander Ross. — 16. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. — 17. Spottis- 
woode ; Calderwood. — 18. Thomas Fuller. — 19. Men of Sci- 
ence; Francis Bacon. — 20. John Napier; William Harvey. — 
21. John Wilkins. — 22. Samuel Hartlib. —23. John Wallis . 337 



CHAPTER VII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : RELIGIOUS, PHILO- 
SOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL WRITERS. 

1. Owen Feltham. — 2. Henry More. — 3. Richard Sibbes. — 4. Jere- 
my Taylor. — 5. William Pry nne. — 6. Peter Heylin. — 7. Wil- 
liam Chillingworth. — 8. Philip Hunton; Sir Robert Filmer. — 
9. John Gauden. — 10. John Milton 308 



CONTENTS. XIX 

CHAPTER VIII. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : POETS, WITS, AND 
DRAMATISTS. 

1. John Milton; his Life and Writings from the Year 1(550. — 2. 
Beginning of the Era of French Literary Influence in Eng- 
land. — 3. The New Criticism; Thomas Rymer. — 4. Edmund 
Waller. — 5. Abraham Cowley; Henry Vaughan. — 6. Samuel 
Butler. — 7. Andrew Marvel. — 8. Sir William Davenant. — 9. 
Dryden's Earlier Contemporaries. — 10. Thomas Killigrew; Sir 
Charles Sedley. — 11. Buckingham. — 12. Dorset; Rochester. 
— 13. Roscommon. — 14. Mulgrave. — 15. Thomas D'Urfey. — 
16. Sir George Etherege. — 17. Samuel Pordage. — 18. Thomas 
Shadwell. — 19. Elkanah Settle. —20. John Crowne. —21. Na- 
thaniel Lee. — 22. Thomas Otway. — 23. Aphra Behn. — 24. 
Catherine Philips. — 25. John Dryden's Life and Writings. — 

26. Dryden's Later Contemporaries; William Wycherley. — 

27. William Congreve. — 28. John Vanbrugh. — 29. George Far- 
quhar. — 30. Thomas Southern. — 31. John Oldham. — 32. 
Nahum Tate. — 33. George Stepney. — 34. Thomas Creech ; 
Richard Duke. — 35. Samuel Garth. — 36. John Pomfret; Wil- 
liam Walsh; William King; Thomas Brown; George Gran- 
ville 387 



CHAPTER IX. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : SCHOLARS, PHI- 
LOSOPHERS, AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 

'1. Thomas Hobbes. — 2. James Harrington. — 3. Eager Spirit of 
Inquiry. — 4. Group of Men of Science. — 5. Robert Boyle. 
— 6. Robert Hooke. — 7. John Ray. — 8. Thomas Sprat. — 9. 
Thomas Sydenham. — 10. Sir Thomas Browne. — 11. Elias Ash- 
mole. — 12. Sir Kenelm Digby. — 13. Sir Isaac Newton. — 14. 
Writers on Political Science; Thomas Mun; Sir Josiah Child; 
Sir William Petty. — 15. Algernon Sidney. — 16. Izaak Walton. 
— 17. Ralph Cud worth. — 18. John Locke . . . .456 



CHAPTER X. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : HISTORIANS, BIOG- 
RAPHERS, DIARISTS, AND ESSAYISTS. 

1. Lord Clarendon. — 2. Samuel Pepys. — 3. John Aubrey. — 4. 
Anthony a Wood. — 5. Gilbert Burnet. — 6. Roger North. — 7. 



XX CONTENTS. 

John Strype. — S. Humphrey Prideaux. — 0. John Evelyn. — 
10. Sir William Temple. — 11. Marchamont Needham; Roger 
L'Estrange. — 12. Jeremy Collier. — 13. Gerard Langbaine . 4S1 

CHAPTER XI. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : THEOLOGICAL AND 
RELIGIOUS WRITERS. 

1. JohnBunyan. — 2. Richard Baxter. — 3. John Howe. — 4. George 
Fox. — 5. Robert Barclay. — 6. William Penn. — 7. Sir George 
Mackenzie. — 8. Isaac Barrow. — 9. John Tillotson. — 10. Rob- 
ert Leighton. — 11. William Beveridge. — 12. Samuel Parker. 
— 13. Thomas Ken; George Morley. — 14. William Sherlock. 

— 15. Robert South; Edward Stillingfleet ; Thomas Tenison . 489 

CHAPTER XII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: POETRY, THE DRAMA, 
AND CRITICISM. 

1. " The Country Mouse and the City Mouse." — 2. Charles Mon- 
tague. — 3. Matthew Prior. — 4. Sir Richard Blackmore. — 5. 

— John Dennis; Charles Gildon; Joseph Spence. — 6. Jona- 
than Swift. — 7*. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. — 8. John 
Philips. —9. Ambrose Philips. — 10. Thomas Tickell. — 11. 
Nicholas Rowe. — 12. Susanna Centlivre. — 13. John Hughes. 
— 14. John Arbuthnot. — 15. Thomas Pamell. — 16. Lewis 
Theobald ; Colley Cibber. — 17. John Gay. — 18. Alexander 
Pope. — 19. Matthew Green. — 20. Allan Ramsay. — 21. James 
Thomson. —22. John Dyer; William Sonierville. —23. Gilbert 
West; John Armstrong. — 24. William Shenstone. — 25. George 
Lillo; Edward Moore; David Mallet; Vincent Bourne; William 
Whitehead; Paul Whitehead; Richard Glover; Christopher 
Pitt; Stephen Duck. —26. Edward Young; Robert Blair.— 27. 
William Collins. — 28. Richard Savage 507 

CHAPTER XIII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : SCIENCE, PHILOSO- 
PHY, AND RELIGION. 

1. Thomas Burnet. —2. William Whiston. — 3. Richard Bentley. — 
4. George Berkeley. — 5. David Hartley. — 6. Bernard de Man- 
deville. — 7. Henry St. John. — 8. Isaac Watts. — 9. Joseph 
Butler. —10. John Wesley; Charles Wesley. — 11. William 
Warburton. — 12. Francis Atterbury; Samuel Clarke; Benja- 
min Hoadly 555 



CONTENTS. xxi 

CHAPTER XIV. 

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : HISTORIANS, PAM- 
PHLETEERS, AND NOVELISTS. 

1. John Oldmixon. — 2. George Lyttelton. — 3. Daniel Defoe. — 4. 

Samuel Richardson. — 5. Henry Fielding 563 

CHAPTER XV. 

SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY I HISTORIANS, BIOG- 
RAPHERS, ESSAYISTS, NOVELISTS, AND PHILOSOPHERS. 

1. Tobias Smollett. — 2. Laurence Sterne. — 3. Joseph Warton ; 
Thomas Warton. — 4. Richard Hurd. — 5. Horace Walpole; 
Lady Maiy Montague. — 6. Samuel Johnson. — 7. David 
Hume. — 8. William Robertson; Edward Gibbon. — 9. Thomas 
Reid. — 10. Adam Smith; Sir William Blackstone. — 11. Ed- 
mund Burke. — 12. William Paley. — 13. Joseph Priestley; 
Thomas Paine; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. — 14. Sir 
Joshua Reynolds; Gilbert White; Edmund Malone; Anna 
Seward; Hannah More; Henry Mackenzie; Frances Burney; 
Sophia and Harriet Lee; William Beckford; Clara Reeve; 
Ann Radcliffe 583 

CHAPTER XVI. 

SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : POETS AND DRAMA- 
TISTS. 

1. Mark Akenside. — 2. Thomas Gray. — 3. Oliver Goldsmith; 
Thomas Chatterton; Charles Churchill. — 4. James Grainger; 
William Falconer ; James Beattie ; James Macpherson ; Thomas 
Percy. — 5. Samuel Foote; David Garrick; Richard Cumber- 
land ; John Home ; Richard Brinsley Sheridan. — 6. William 
Cowper. — 7. Robert Burns. — 8. Erasmus Darwin ; Elizabeth 
Carter; JohnWolcot; Anna Laetitia Barbauld; Henry James 
Pye ; James Grahame. — 9. Elizabeth Inchbald ; Hannah 
Cowley; Charles and Thomas Dibdin 603 

CHAPTER XVII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY : POETS. 

1. William Wordsworth. — 2. 3amuel Taylor Coleridge. — 3. Robert 
Southey. — 4. Sir Walter Scott. — 5. George Crabbe. — 6. Sam- 



XX11 CONTENTS. 

uel Rogers. — 7. Thomas Campbell. —8. Walter Savage Landor. 
— 9. Thomas Moore. — 1(X Lord Byron. — 11. Percy Bysshe 
Shelley. — 12. John Keats. — 13. Robert Bloomfield ; William L. 
Bowles; Mary Tighe; James Montgomery; Robert Montgomery ; 
Henry Kirke White; Reginald Heber; Felicia Hemans; James 
Hogg; T. L. Beddoes; JohnKeble; Ebenezer Elliott; Hartley 
Coleridge; Arthur Henry Hallam ; Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 617 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY : NOVELISTS AND DRAMA- 
TISTS. 

1. Sir Walter Scott.'— 2. Prominence of the Novel as a Form of 
Literature. — 3. William Godwin; Maria Edgeworth; Mat- 
thew Gregory Lewis; Amelia Opie; Jane Austen; Jane Porter; 
Anna Maria Porter; Barbara Hofland; Mary Brimton. — 4. 
Mrs. Shelley; James Morier; Thomas Hope; Robert P. Ward; 
Theodore Hook; Thomas H. Lister; Lady Blessington; Mrs. 
Trollope; Mary Russell Mitford; G. P. R. James; John Gait; 
William H. Ainsworth. — 5. Dramatists: Joanna Baillie; Sir 
Thomas Noon Talfourd; James Sheridan Knowles. — 6. Six 
Greatest Novelists between 1830 and 1850: Captain Marryat; 
Lord Lytton; Lord Beaconsfield; Charlotte Bronte;/ Charles 
Dickens ^William Makepeace Thackeray 632 



CHAPTER XIX. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ! ESSAYISTS, SATIRISTS, 
HISTORIANS, AND BIOGRAPHERS. 

1. William Gifford. — 2. William Cobbett. — 3. Leigh Hunt. —4. 
Charles Lamb. — 5. William Hazlitt. — 6. Sydney Smith. — 
7. John Wilson. — 8. Thomas De Quincey. — 9. James and 
Horace Smith. — 10. Lord Jeffrey ; Lord Brougham ; Lord Ma- 
caulay. — 11. John Foster. — 12. Thomas Hood. — 13. Douglas 
Jerrold. — 14. Thomas Carl yle. — 15. Historians: Henry Hart 
Milman; James Mill; William Mitford; Connop Thirlwall; 
John Lingard; Patrick Fraser Ty tier; Henry Hallam; George 
Grote; Thomas Arnold; Earl Stanhope; Sir William Napier; 
Sharon Turner; Lord Macaulay. — 16. Biographers: John 
Gibson Lockhart; William Roscoe; Nathan Drake , . . 036 



CONTENTS. XX111 

CHAPTER XX. 

FreST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY : SCHOLARS, PHILOSO- 
PHERS, THEOLOGIANS, AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 

1. Scholars: Richard Porson ; Isaac Disraeli; Thomas F. Dibdin; 
George L. Craik; John Payne Collier. — 2. Philosophers: 
Dugald Stewart; Thomas Brown; Sir James Mackintosh; Sir 
William Hamilton; Richard Whately. — 3. Theologians: Rob- 
ert Hall; Thomas Chalmers; Augustus William Hare; Julius 
Charles Hare; Edward B. Pusey; John Keble; John Henry 
Newman; Thomas Arnold; Frederick D. Maurice; Frederick 
W. Robertson. — 4. Men of Political Science : Jeremy Bentham ; 
T. R. Malthus; David Ricardo; Nassau W. Senior. — 5. Men 
of Physical Science : Sir William Herschel ; Sir Humphry Davy ; 
Michael Faraday ; Mary Somerville ; Sir Charles Lyell ; Hugh 
Miller 640 



CHAFrER XXI. 

SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY : CONCLUSION . 642 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



INTRODUCTION. 

1. The literature of a people tells its life. History records 
its deeds ; but literature brings to us, }'et warm with their first 
heat, the appetites and passions, the keen intellectual debate, 
the higher promptings of the soul, whose blended energies pro- 
duced the substance of the record. We see some part of a 
man's outward life, and guess his character, but do not know 
it as we should if we heard also the debate within, loud under 
outward silence, and could be spectators of each conflict for 
which lists are set within the soul. Such witnesses we are, 
through English literature, of the life of the English-speaking 
race. Let us not begin the study with a dull belief that it is 
but a bewilderment of names, dates, and short summaries of 
conventional opinion, which must be learned by rote. As soon 
as we can feel that we belong to a free people with a noble 
past, let us begin to learn through what endeavors and to what 
end it is free. Liberty as an abstraction is not worth a song. 
It is precious onl}' for that which it enables us to be and do. 
Let us bring our hearts, then, to the study which we here begin, 
and seek through it accord with that true soul of our country 
b} T which we may be encouraged to maintain in our own day 
the best work of our forefathers. 

The literature of England has for its most distinctive mark 
the religious sense of duty. It represents a people striving 
through successive generations to find out the right, and do it, 
to root out the wrong, and labor ever onward for the love of 
God. If this be really the strong spirit of her people, to show 

1 



2 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

that it is so is to tell how England won, and how alone the 
English race can expect to keep, the foremost place among the 
nations. . 

2. One of the first facts for the student of English literature 
to make note of is the identity and the continuity of that litera- 
ture, under all changes in its outward form, from a time near 
the middle of the seventh century down to the present. Some 
have taught that English literature begins in the fourteenth 
century, with Chaucer and his associates ; and that the litera- 
ture that was in England before that time, being called by such 
names as Anglo-Saxon and Semi-Saxon, was quite another 
matter, — was a literature so different from the English as to 
be almost an alien literature. This is a twofold mistake, his- 
torical and literar} T . For at least seven hundred years before 
Chaucer the people of England called themselves the English 
people, just as they have done during the five hundred } T ears 
since Chaucer ; and during all those centuries the t y have uni- 
formly called their language and their literature English like- 
wise. For twelve hundred } T ears the people and the speech of 
England have preserved themselves ; they have gone steadily 
forward in their normal development ; neither has lost its iden- 
tity. Moreover, English literature before Chaucer, not only 
had this long existence of seven hundred years, but it was abun- 
dant in many forms of prose and poetry. When Chaucer came, 
instead of supposing himself to be at the beginning of a litera- 
ture, he thought himself at the end of one ; and in his poems 
he asks forbearance of his readers, on the plea that all the 
harvest of poetry had then been reaped by his predecessors, 
and that he could only go through the field, and glean among 
their leavings. 

3. We need, also, early in our studies, to fix upon some clear 
and useful sj-stem for the division of English literature into 
periods. Of course, all such divisions are arbitrary ; some of 
them are likewise fanciful and confusing: yet, | if we can dis- 
cover one that is without. the faults last mentioned, we shall 
find these advantages in it : — 

(1) It will break up a very large subject into manageable 
portions. 






INTRODUCTION. 3 

(2) It will help us to see the successive influences that have 
been at work in the formation of English literature. 

(3) It will help us. to see the relations between the literary 
history of each period and its general history as presented in 
politics, social life, religion, science, and art. 

(4) It will help us to connect the traits of each author with 
those of his own period, and to see their mutual relations. 

A very reasonable system for the division of English litera- 
ture into periods is one which identifies its several great epochs 
with the several great epochs of the language in which it is 
written. Thus, during the twelve centuries in which the Eng- 
lish language has existed, there have been at least four great 
epochs in its development. During the first epoch, extending 
from 670 to the Norman Conquest in 106G, the language may 
be described as First English, or Anglo-Saxon. During the 
second epoch, extending from the Norman Conquest to the 
middle of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer's career began, 
the language may be described as Transitional English. During 
the third epoch, extending from the middle of the fourteenth 
centuiT to the middle of the sixteenth century, near the begin- 
ning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the language may be described 
as Early Modern English. During the fourth epoch, extending 
from the middle of the sixteenth century to the present, the 
language ma}' be described as Modern English. 

In the following treatise, therefore, we shall break up the 
twelve centuries of English literature into four great periods 
corresponding to these four great stages in the development of 
the English language. 

I. Period of First English, or Anglo-Saxon, 670-1066, 
II. Period of Transitional English, 1066-1350. 

III. Period of Early Modem English, 1350-1550, 

IV. Period of Modern English, 1550 to the present. 

Of these four periods, the first two can be conveniently dealt 
with in bulk, each b}- itself; but, for the last two periods, the 
literature is so immense, and the transitions in literary spirit 



4 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and form are so rapid, that each needs to be broken up into 
smaller and subordinate divisions. It is a great help to clear- 
ness of apprehension on the part of the student, as well as to 
fixedness of recollection, if these smaller and subordinate divis- 
ions of English literary history can be made to correspond to 
those simple and natural divisions of English history in general, 
with which all readers are familiar, namely, divisions into cen- 
turies and half- centuries. Accordingly, in this work, beginning 
with 1350, — at the threshold of our Period of Early Modern 
English, — we have arranged English writers and their works in 
groupings of half-centuries, as "The First Half of the Eigh- 
teenth Century," "The Second Half of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tuiy," and so forth. The only exception to this practice is in 
the case of the fifteenth century, of which the entire literary 
record is so meagre, that it does not need to be divided into 
halves. Thus the student will be accustomed, from the outset, 
to associate his knowledge of the literary history of England 
with his knowledge of its general, social, political, or military 
history in the same spaces of time, and thereby to see more 
truly how all these several expressions of the national life of 
England were swayed at every point b} T the same influences, 
how each remains as a witness and a clew to the character of 
all the others, and how, at last, all need to be studied together, 
if he would deeply know the history whose meaning he is trying 
to master. 



Paet I. 
FIRST ENGLISH, OR ANGLO-SAXON 

670-1066. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

PERIOD OF FIRST ENGLISH, OR 
ANGLO-SAXON: 670-1066. 

POETS. 



Caedmon. 

Author of Beowulf. 
Aldhelm. 
Cynewulf. 

Authors of Poems in Exeter 
Book. 



Authors of Poems in Ver- 
celli Book. 

Authors of Poems in Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle. 

King Canute. 



PROSE-WRITERS. 



Bede. 

King Alfred. 

Ethelwold. 



JElfric. 

Authors of Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle. 



CHAPTER I. 
THE FORMING OP THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 

1. The Earliest Europeans. — 2. The Celts. — 3. The Teutons. — 4. Their Blending 
into the English People. — 5. Traits contributed by the Celts. — 6. Traits con- 
tributed by the Teutons. 

1. Oxce Europe was peopled only here and there by men 
who beat at the doors of nature, and upon the heads of one 
another, with sharp flints. What knowledge the}' struck out in 
man}' years was bettered by instruction from incoming tribes, 
who, beginning earlier or learning faster, brought higher results 
of experience out of some part of the region that we now call 
Asia. Generation after generation came and went, and then 
Europe was peopled by tribes different in temper, — some scat- 
tered among pastures with their flocks and herds, or gathering 
for fight and plunder around chiefs upon whom they depended ; 
others drawing together on the fields they ploughed, able to win, 
and strong to hold, the good land of the plain in battle under 
chiefs whose strength depended upon them. But none can dis- 
tinguish surely the forefathers of these most remote forefathers 
of the Celt and Teuton, in whose unlike tempers lay some of 
the elements from which, when generations after generations 
more had passed away, a Shakespeare was to come. 

2. The first of these great tribes who came into the British 
Isles were the Celts ; and of these there were two distinct 
families, — the Gaelic Celts and the Cymric Celts. The former, 
migrating by sea from Spain, struck on the eastern coast of 
Ireland and on the south-western shores of England, and thence 
spread thinly over both islands. Afterwards the Cymric Celts, 
who had been seated in Belgium and the north of France, being 
crowded and hustled by an advancing Teutonic tribe, fled across 
the Channel, landed on the south coast of England, and gradu- 
ally forced the main body of their predecessors in Southern 

7 



8 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

Britain (the Gaelic Celts) to join their countrymen across the 
Irish Sea. Soon, however, the Teutons, who had formed a 
Belgic Gaul, crossed the English Channel, and were strong 
enough to form a Belgic England ; and from all lands opposite 
the eastern coast of Britain, the Teutons kept coming over as 
colonists. 

3. This process of change was continuous, and may have 
been so for some centuries before the hundred j^ears between 
the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century 
after Christ, during which there were six Teutonic settlements 
thought worth}- of especial record. The six settlements were 
thus distinguished because they established sovereignties, and 
began the strong uprearing of the nation which took from a 
great immigrant Teutonic tribe its name of English. 

The First English, who are commonly known by the school- 
name of Anglo-Saxons, but who even then called themselves 
the English people (Englisc folc) , were formed by a gradual 
blending of Teutonic tribes. They came, at different times 
and in different generations, from different parts of the 
opposite coast. > On the eastern shores, from the Moray 
Firth to below Whitby, the land lay readiest of access to men 
from the opposite side of the North Sea, among whom Scandi- 
navians were numerous ; accordingly the Scandinavian element 
is chiefly represented in the character, form, face, and provin- 
cial dialects of the north country. The part of the east coast 
belonging now to Lincolnshire was readiest of access to the 
Danes ; and in Lincolnshire the Danish element is strongly 
represented. Farther south, the coast was opposite the Frisian 
settlements ; therefore, among the immigrants over the North 
Sea to Southern England, the Frisians, forefathers of the 
modern Dutchmen, would predominate. Adventurers of many 
tribes might join in any single expedition. When they had 
formed their settlements, the Teutonic spirit of co-operation, 
and the social progress that came of it, produced changes of 
home, intermarriages, community of interests, communuVv of 
speech in a language proper to the cultivated men of the 
whole country. This manner of speech, First English (or 
Anglo-Saxon), was not brought complete from any place 



To A.D. 1066.] FORMING OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 9 

upon the Continent, but it was formed here by a fusion of 
the closely-related languages or dialects of the Teutonic im- 
migrants. 

4. Thus we see that by the year 670, at about which time 
the first writing in English literature was produced, there was 
in the British Isles a population consisting in part of Celts, and 
in part of Teutons ; and it is from a blending of these tribes 
during the twelve centuries that have elapsed since then, that 
the present English-speaking race have derived their plrysical 
and spiritual qualities. English literature from the seventh 
century to the nineteenth is a continuous expression of those 
qualities, both spiritual and physical. 

5. First we desire to know what qualities have been con- 
tributed to the common stock by the Celt ; for his influence on 
English literature proceeds not from example set by one people, 
and followed by another, but, in the way of nature, by establish- 
ment of blood-relationship and the transmission of modified 
and blended character to a succeeding generation. The Gaelic 
Celt — now represented by the Irish and the Highland Scotch — 
was at his best an artist. He had a sense of literature ; he 
had active and bold imagination, jo} r in bright color, skill in 
music, touches of a keen sense of honor in most savage times, 
and in religion fervent and self-sacrificing zeal. In the Cymric 
Celt — now represented by the Welsh — there was the same 
artist nature. B} T natural difference, and partly, no doubt, 
because their first known poets learned in suffering what they 
taught in song, the oldest Cymric music comes to us, not like 
the music of the Irish harp, in throbbings of a pleasant tuneful- 
ness, but as a wail that beats again, again, and again some 
iterated burden on the ear. 

In the fusion of the two races, the Celtic and Teutonic, 
which slowly began among the hills and valleys of the north 
and west of England, where the populations came most freely 
into contact, the gift of genius was the contribution of the 
Celt. " The true glory of the Celt in Europe," says James 
Fergusson, "is his artistic eminence. It is not, perhaps, 
too much to assert, that, without his intervention, we should 
not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of ad- 



10 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

miration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without 
shame." 

The sense of literature was shown in the earliest times b} T 
the support of a distinct literary class among the Celts, who 
then possessed England. In Erin, the first headquarters of 
song and story, even in the third centuiy there was the poet 
with his staff of office, a square tablet staff, on the four sides of 
which he cut his verse ; and there were degrees in literature. 
There was the Ollamh, or perfect doctor, who could recite seven 
fifties of historic tales ; and there were others, down to the 
Driseg, who could tell but twenty. As we travel down from 
the remotest time of which there can be doubtful record, we 
find the profession of historian to be a recognized calling, 
transmitted in one family from generation to generation, and 
these later professors of histoiy still bore the name of Ollamhs. 
Of the active and bold fancy that accompanied this Celtic sense 
of literature as an art, and of the Celt's (delight in bright color, 
almost any one of the old Gaelic poems will bear witness. The 
delight in color is less manifest in the first poems of the Cymry. 
For them the one color was that of blood : they are of the 
sixth century, and sing of men who died in the vain fight 
against the spreading power of the Teuton. Of those Gaels, 
who were known as Gauls to Rome, Diodorus the Sicilian told, 
three centuries before the time of Fionn and Oisin, how they 
wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, and dyed 
tunics flowered with colors of every kind, trews, striped cloaks 
fastened with a brooch, and divided into many party-colored 
squares, — a taste still represented \>y the Highland plaid. In 
the old Gaelic tale of the " Tain Bo " men are described march- 
ing : " Some are with red cloaks ; others with light-bine cloaks ; 
others with deep-blue cloaks ; others with green, or gray, or 
white, or yellow cloaks, bright and fluttering about them. 
There is a }'oung, red-freckled lad, with a crimson cloak, in 
the midst of them ; a golden brooch in that cloak at his 
breast." Even the ghost of a Celt, if it dropped the sub- 
stance, retained all the coloring of life. The vivacity of Celtic 
fancy is shown also by an outpouring of bold metaphor and 
effective simile : — 






To A.D. 1066.] FORMING OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 11 

" Both shoulders covered with his painted shield, 
The hero there, swift as the war-horse, rushed. 
Noise in the mount of slaughter, — noise and fire : 
The darting lances were as gleams of sun. 
There the glad raven fed. The foe must fly- 
While he so swept them, as when in his course 
An eagle strikes the morning dews aside, 
And like a whelming billow struck their front. 
Brave men, so say the bards, are dumb to slaves. 
Spears wasted men; and ere the swan-white steeds 
Trod the still grave that hushed the master voice, 
His blood washed all his arms. Such was Buddvan, 
Son of Bleedvan the Bold." 
Here, in a mere average stanza, containing one of the ninety 
"celebrations of the Cymric chiefs who fell at Cattraeth, we have 
more similes than in the six thousand and odd lines (English 
measure) of "Beowulf," the first heroic poem of the Teutonic 
section of our people. The delight in music — among the old 
Irish Celts in the music of the harp and tabor, among the old 
Welsh Celts in the music of the harp, the pipe, and the crowd 
— is another characteristic. It is noted also that the music of 
the Gaels was sweet, lively, and rapid, and that the music 
of the Cymiy was slower and more monotonous. 

6. But what, we ask in the second place, are the qualities 
contributed to the common English stock by the Teutons? 
They were wanting in vivacity of genius. The}' were practi- 
cal, earnest, social, true to a high sense of dut} T , and' had faith 
in God. They used few similes, and, although their poetry is 
sometimes said to abound in metaphor, its metaphors were few 
and obvious. By metaphor a word is turned out of its natural 
sense. There is little of metaphor in calling the sea the water- 
street, the whale-road, or the swan-road ; the ship, a wave-trav- 
erser, the sea-wood, or the floating-wood ; a chief's retainers, 
his hearth- sharers ; or night, the shadow-covering of creatures. 
This kind of poetical periphrasis abounds in First English po- 
etry ; but it proceeds from the thoughtful habit of realization, 
which extends also to a representation of the sense of words 
hy some literal suggestion that will bring them quickened with 
a familiar experience or human association to the mind. There 
is in the unmixed English an imagination with deep roots and 



12 MAyi'AL OF EXGLLSH LITEBA7VT:! A.D. 670. 

little flower, solid stem and no luxuriance of foliage. Thai 
which it w as in ape et's mind to a -: dized first, and 

uttered with a direct earnestness which carried every thought 
straight home to the apprehension of the listener. The de- 
scendants of those Frisians who did not cross fee England 
1 aseml I flie First English before they had been quickened with 
a dash of Celtic blood. Both Dutch and English, when the see 
c : C hristianity struck root among them, mastered the first con- 
ditions of a full development : its grand truths vrith the same 
solid earnestness, and their convictions out to the same 

practical result. Hollan eed, has been, not less than Eng- 

land, a battle-ground of civil and religious liberty. The power 
of the English character, and therefore of the literature that 
expresses it, lies in this energetic sense of truth, and this 
firm habit of looking to the end. Christianity having been 
once ac septed, aided as i: was greatly in its first establishment 
among us by zeal of the Gael and Cymry, the First English 
writers fastened upon it, and throughout the whole subsequent 
history of our literature, varied and enlivened by the 
blending of the races that joined in the forming of the nation, 
its religious energy has been the cent:;- of its life. 






CHAPTER II. 
'FIRST ENGLISH POETRY. 

1. The Long Line of English Poets. — 2. Caedmon.— 3. His Paraphrase. — *. Beo- 
wulf.— 5. Aldhelm. — 6. Other Poets. — 7. Mechanism of First English Verse. 

1. We may think of all the poets that English literature has 
had during these twelve hundred }~ears as a great host of men 
and women still marching in long procession, and still singing 
their songs to all who will listen. As our eyes move down the 
line, we catch sight of Chaucer, and Lydgate, and Sackville, 
and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden, and 
Pope, and Burns, and Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shelley, 
and Elizabeth Browning, and Tennyson. It ma} r well seem to 
us the most glorious arm}' that ever marched ; and it interests 
us to know that at the very head of it walks a man who lived 
as far off as the latter half of the seventh centuiy, and who 
was of so lowly origin that he seemed to rise out of the earth, 
and to come to his great vocation of song, not b} r human train- 
ing, but by inspiration of God. The name of the first poet in 
English literature is Caedmon. 

2. It appears that, in the 3-ear 657, a holy woman, the Abbess 
Hilda, founded a monastery at Whitby, on one of the high cliffs 
of the coast of Yorkshire, looking off upon the North Sea. 
Among the tenants of the abbey lands near by was this humb?3 
person, Caedmon, quite innocent of any knowledge of letters, 
already well advanced in years, but a devout conVert from 
Paganism to the Christian faith, of which the new monastery 
was a beacon in all that dark neighborhood. One day he 
joined a festive party at the house of some remoter neighbor of 
the country-side. The visitors came in on horseback and afoot, 
or in country cars, drawn, some by horses, and some by oxen. 
There was occasion for festivity that would last longer than a 
day. The draught cattle of the visitors were stabled, and 

13 



14 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

would need watching of nights, since, in wild times, cattle- 
plunder also was a recreation, and one that joined business to 
pleasure. The visitors took turns by night in keeping watch 
over the stables. One evening when Caedmon sat with his com- 
panions over the ale-cup, and the song went round, his sense of 
song was keen ; but, as a zealous Christian convert, he turned 
with repugnance from the battle-strains and heathen tales that 
were being chanted to the music of the rude harp which passed 
from hand to hand. As the harp came nearer to him, he rose, 
since it was his turn that night to watch the cattle, and escaped 
into the stables. There, since we know b} r Ms work that he 
was true poet-born, his train of thought, doubtless, continued till 
it led to a strong 3-earning for another form of song. If, for 
these heathen lrymns of war and rapine, knowledge and praise 
of God could be the glad theme of their household music ! and 
if he, — even he — Perhaps we may accept as a true dream the 
vision which Becle next tells as a miracle. Csedmon watched, 
slept ; and in his sleep one came to him and said, " Csedmon, 
sing." He said, "I cannot. I came hither out of the feast 
because I cannot sing." — " But," answered the one who came 
to him, "3'ou have to sing to me." — " What," Caedmon asked, 
" ought I to sing?" And he answered, "Sing the origin of 
creatures." Having received which answer, Bede tells us, he 
began immediately to sing, in praise of God the Creator, verses 
of which this is the sense: "Now we ought to praise the 
Author of the heavenly kingdom, the power of the Creator 
and his counsel, the deeds of the Father of glory : how he, 
though the eternal God, became the Author of all marvels ; 
omnipotent Guardian, who created for the sons of men, first 
heaven for their roof, and then the earth." " This," adds 
Bede, " is the sense, but not the order of the words which he 
sang when sleeping." Caedmon remembered, upon waking, the 
few lines he had made in his sleep, and continued to make 
others like them. The vision seems to have been simply the 
dream-form given to a continuation of his waking thoughts ; and 
Caedmon ma} T well have believed, according to the simple faith 
of his time, that in his dream he had received a command from 
heaven. He went in the morning to the steward of the land he 



ToA.D. 1066.] CJEDMON. 15 

held under the abbe}', and proposed to use his gift of song in 
aid of the work that was being done by Abbess Hilda and her 
companions. Hilda called him to her, up the great rock, and, 
to test his power, caused pieces of Scripture story to be told to 
him, then bade him go home, and turn them into verse. He 
returned next day with the work so well done, that his teachers 
became, in turn, his hearers. Hilda then counselled him to give 
up his occupations as a layman, and received him with all his 
goods into the monasteiy. There sacred history was taught to 
him, that he might place the word of God in pleasant song 
within their homes, and on their highways, and at festive gath- 
erings, upon the lips of the surrounding people. He was him- 
self taught by religious men trained in the Celtic school, which 
was more closely allied to the Eastern than the Western Church. 
The}- knew and read the Chaldee Scriptures, and, as their new 
brother began his work with the song of Genesis, the name 
they gave him in the monastery was the Chaldee name of the 
Book of Genesis, derived from its first words, " In the begin- 
ning," that being, in the Chaldee, b'Cadmon. 

3. Caedmon sang, in what is now called his " Paraphrase," 
of the creation, and with it of the war in heaven, of the fall 
of Satan, and of his counsellings in hell as the Strong Angel of 
Presumption. Thus Caedmon began, first in time and among 
the first in genius, the strain of English poetiy : — 

" Most right it is that we praise with our words, 
Love in our minds, the Warden of the skies, 
Glorious King of all the hosts of men: 
He speeds the strong, and is the head of all 
His high creation, the almighty Lord. 
Xone formed him : no first was, nor last shall be, 
Of the eternal Ruler; but his sway 
Is everlasting over thrones in heaven." 

Caedmon paints the Angel of Presumption, }'et in heaven, 
questioning whether he would serve God : — 

" ' Wherefore,' he said, ' shall I toil ? 
No need have I of master. I can work 
With my own hands great marvels, and have power 
To build a throne more worthy of a God, 
Higher in heaven. Why shall I, for his smile, 



16 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

Serve him, bend to him thus in vassalage ? 

I may be God as he. 

Stand by me, strong supporters, firm in strife. 

Hard-mooded heroes, famous warriors, 

Have chosen me for chief; one may take thought 

With such for counsel, and, with such, secure 

Large following. My friends in earnest they, 

Faithful in all the shaping of their minds ; 

I am their master, and may rule this realm.' " 

And thus, to quote one passage more, Csedmon, a thousand 
years before the time of Milton, sang of Satan fallen : — 

f " Satan discoursed; he who henceforth ruled hell 
Spake sorrowing. 

God' s angel erst, he had shone white in heaven, 
Till his soul urged, and, most of all, its pride, 
That of the Lord of hosts he should no more 
Bend to the word. About his heart, his soul 
Tumultuously, heaved, hot pains of wrath 
Without him. 

Then said he, ' Most unlike this narrow place 
To that which once we knew, high in heaven's realm, 
Which my Lord gave me, though therein no more 
For the Almighty we hold royalties. 
Yet right hath he not done in striking us 
Down to the fiery bottom of hot hell, 
Banished from heaven's kingdom, with decree 
That he will set in it the race of man. 
Worst of my sorrows this, that, wrought of earth, 
Adam shall sit in bliss on my strong throne ; 
Whilst we these pangs endure, this grief in hell. 
Woe, woe ! Had I the power of my hands, 
And for a season, for one winter's space, 
Might be without, then with this host, I — 
But iron binds me round ; this coil of chains 
Rides me ; I rule no more ; close bonds of hell 
Hem me their prisoner.' " 

Csedmon, when he has thus told the story of creation and the 
fall of man, follows the Scripture story to the flood, and repre- 
sents with simple words the rush of waters, and the ark " at 
large under the skies over the orb of ocean." So he goes on, 
picturing clearly to himself what with few words he pictures for 
his hearer. The story of Abraham proceeds to the triumph of 
his faith in God ; when he had led his son Isaac to the top of a 



To A.D. 1066.] BEOWULF. 17 

high mount by the sea, he " began to load the pile, awaken fire, 
and fettered the hands and feet of his child ; then hove on the 
pile 3'oung Isaac ; and then hastily gripped the sword by the hilt, 
would kill his son with his own hands, quench the fire with the 
youth's blood." From this scene of God's blessing on the 
perfect faith of Abraham, Csedmon proceeds next to the passage 
of the Red Sea by the Israelites, — a story of the power of God, 
who is able to lead those who put their faith in him unhurt 
through the midst of the great waters. And the next subject 
of the extant paraphrase is taken from the Book of Daniel, to 
show the same Power leading Han amah, Azariah, and Mishael, 
with their garments unsinged, through the furnace-fire. This 
paraphrase closes with Belshazzar's feast. The rest is from the 
New Testament, inscribed in the one extant manuscript less 
carefully, and by a later hand. It has for its subject Christ and 
Satan. It is fragmentary ; and perhaps no part of it is b}' Csed- 
mon, except that which describes the fasting and temptation in 
the wilderness. *^ 

4. Thus the English heart sang through the verse of Csedmon 
its first great hymn based on the Word of Truth. But in the 
English heart, side by side with its sense of need, and of duty 
toward God, lay its sturdy joy in combat with man ; and not far 
from the time when was born this first great English poem of 
religion, was born likewise the first great English poem of war. 

The Teutonic settlers in England had brought along with 
them from the Continent an heroic legend concerning a chief 
named Beowulf, who was a Pagan like themselves ; and the 
memory of him they kept alive within them long after they had 
ceased somewhat to be Pagans. B3- some unknown Christian 
poet, writing in the same north of England where Csedmon 
was uttering his inspirations, this old legend was put into Eng- 
lish verse, forming a poem of 6,357 short lines, and bearing 
the name of its hero, " Beowulf." It is the most ancient heroic 
poem in any Germanic language. Its hero sails from a land of 
the Goths to a land of the Danes, and there he frees a chief 
named Hrothgar from the attacks of a monster of the fens and 
moors, named Grendel. Afterwards he is himself ruler, is 
wounded mortally in combat with a dragon, and is solemnly 



18 MAJSTJAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

buried under a great barrow on a promontory rising high above 
the sea. " And round about the mound rode his hearth-sharers, 
who sang that he was of kings, of men, the mildest, kinder, to 
his people sweetest, and the readiest in search of praise." In 
this poem real events are transformed into legendary marvels ; 
but the actual life of the old Danish and Scandinavian chiefs 
as it was first transferred to this country is vividly painted. It 
brings before us the feast in the mead-hall, with the chief and 
his hearth-sharers, the customs of the banquet, the rude begin- 
nings of a courtly ceremon} T , the boastful talk, reliance upon 
strength of hand in grapple with the foe, and the practical spirit 
of adventure that seeks peril as a commercial speculation ; for 
Beowulf is undisguisedly a tradesman in his sword. The poem 
includes, also, expression of the heathen fatalism, " What is to 
be goes ever as it must," tinged by the energetic sense of men 
who feel that even fate helps those who help themselves ; or. as 
it stands in "Beowulf," that "the Must Be often helps an 
undoomed man when he is brave." 

5. These two poets, Caedmon and the unknown author of 
" Beowulf," were doubtless the greatest poets in our First Eng- 
lish period ; but, among the other poets of that period, a beau- 
tiful and interesting character was Aldhelm. He was born 
in 656, was of gentle stock, was well taught by the learned 
Adrian ; and for the love of God he gave his life, with all 
his intellectual and his material wealth, to the monastery at 
Malmesbury. In 672, at the very time when Caedmon was 
doing his poetic work at Whitb}', Aldhelm, a youth of sixteen, 
joined a poor monastery which had been founded by a Soot, 
more learned than rich, named Meldum, after whom the place 
had its name of Meldum's B}Tig, or Malmesbury. The place 
was so poor that the monks had not enough to eat. Aldhelm 
obtained a grant of the monastery, rebuilt the church, gathered 
religious companies about him, and inspired in them his zeal 
for a pure life. He was a musician and a poet : played, it is 
said, all the instruments of music used in his time. His letters 
and his Latin verse, chiefly in praise of chastity, survive : but 
those English songs of his which were still on the lips of the 
people in King Alfred's day are lost to us. Williain of Mamies- 



To A.D. 1066.I CYNEWULF. 19 

bury has recorded, on King Alfred's authority, that Aldhelm 
was unequalled as an inventor and singer of English verse ; and 
that a song ascribed to him, which was still familiar among the 
people, had been sung by Aldhelm, on the bridge between coun- 
try and town, in the character of an English minstrel or glee- 
man, to keep the people from running home directly after mass 
was sung, as it was their habit to do, without waiting for the 
sermon. Another stoiy is, that on a Sunday, at a time when 
many traders from different parts of the country came into 
Malmesbmy, Abbot Aldhelm stationed himself on the bridge, 
and there, by his songs, caused some of those who would have 
passed to stay by him, and, leaving their trade until the mor- 
row, follow him to church. 

6. Apart from " Beowulf," and Caedmon's "Paraphrase," 
each existing in a single manuscript, the main bod}' of the First 
English poetry that has come down to us has been preserved in 
two collections, known as the Exeter Book and the Ver- 
celli Book. Each is named from the place where it was 
found. The Exeter Book is a collection of poems given, with 
other volumes, to the library of his cathedral by Leofric, Bishop 
of Exeter, between the years 1046 and 1073. The other vol- 
ume was discovered in 1823, in a monastery at Vercelli, in the 
Milanese, where it had been mistaken for a relic, of Eusebius, 
who was once Bishop of Vercelli. 

Among the pieces in these volumes are three of considerable 
length, by a poet named Cynewulf, who, according to one 
opinion, was Bishop of Lindisfarne, and died in 780, or, accord- 
ing to another opinion, was Abbot of Peterborough, and died 
in 1014. In the Vercelli Book is Cynewulf s " Elene," a poem 
of 2,648 lines, on the legend of St. Helen, or the finding of 
the true cross by the mother of Constantine. In the Exeter 
Book we have Cynewulf s legend of "Juliana," martyr in the 
days of Emperor Maximian, and a series of poems which have 
unit}* among themselves, and have been read as a single work, — 
Cynewulf s " Christ." Cynewulf deals with Scripture history 
and legend in a devout spirit ; and his poems are interesting, 
although their earnestness is not quickened by any touch of 
genius. 



20 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

Among other poems in the two collections, we hare in the 
Exeter Book "The Traveller's Song," which is sometimes 
thought to be the oldest of First English poems ; the legend of 
"St. Guthlac ; " " The Phoenix," an allegory of the life of the 
Christian; " The Panther " and " The Whale," two examples 
of the early Christian fashion of turning natural history into 
religious apologue ; " An Address of the Soul to the Body; " 
" The Various Fortunes of Men ; " and some " Proverbs " and 
"Riddles." The collection contains a few pieces not exclu- 
sively devotional, and it represents in fair proportion the whole 
character of First English poetry. Since it was produced by an 
educated class trained in the monasteries, the religious tone 
might be expected to predominate, even if this were not also 
the literature of a religious people. The domestic feeling of 
the Teuton is tenderly expressed among these poems in a little 
strain from shipboard on the happiness of him whose wife 
awaits on shore the dear bread-winner, ready to wash his travel- 
stained clothes and to clothe him anew by her own spinning 
and weaving. 

In the Vercelli Book, beside Cynewulfs "Helen," there is 
a still longer legend of " St. Andrew," with a "Vision of the 
Holy Rood," the beginning of a poem on " The Falsehood of 
Men," a poem on " The Fates of the Apostles," and two 
"Addresses of the Soul to the Body," one corresponding to 
that in the Exeter Book. Such poems, in which the soul de- 
bates with the body as chief cause of sin, remained popular for 
centuries. 

Among the remains of First English poetry outside the Exe- 
ter and the Vercelli Book, the most interesting of those which 
seem to have been produced before the end of the eighth cen- 
tury is a fragment of old battle-song known as " The Fight at 
Finnesburg ; " also a fine fragment of a poem on "Judith," 
and a fragment of a gloomy poem on "The Grave." 

Few poems remain to us from the First English period, be- 
longing to the 3 T ears after the eighth century. The writers of 
that famous national record called " The Anglo-Saxon Chroni- 
cle " occasionally rise from prose into verse, and in this way 
has been preserved the poem of ' ' The Battle of Brunanburh. ' ' 



To A.D. 1066.] CANUTE. 21 

There remains to us, nearly complete, a First English poem on 
" The Battle of Maldon," or, as it is also called, " The Death 
of BjThtnoth," warm with the generous love of independence, 
and 3'et simply honest in its record of defeat, through which we 
feel, as it were, the pulse of the nation beating healthily. 

Perhaps the most famous specimen of the poetiy of this pe- 
riod is a scrap of song believed to have been composed \>y King 
Canute. One day, when he was going by boat to Ely to keep 
a church festival, he ordered his men to row slowly, and near 
shore, that he might hear the psalms of the monks ; then he 
called to his companions to sing with him, and invented on the 
spot a little song : — 

" Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely 
Tha Cnut ching reuther by; 
Rotheth cnites ner tlie land 
And here ye tbes Muneches sang." 
(" Pleasantly sang the monks in Ely 
When Canute the king rowed by; 
Row, boys, near the land, 
And hear ye the song of the monks.") 

Then followed other verses, said to have been still remembered 
and sung a hundred years after the Conquest. 

7. As to their mechanism, there is one measure for " Beo- 
wulf," Csedmon's " Paraphrase," and all subsequent First Eng- 
lish poems. There is no rrryrue, and no counting of S3'llat|les. 
The lines are short, depending upon accent for a rhythm var}ing 
in accordance with the thought to be expressed, and depending 
for its emphasis upon alliteration. Usually, in the first of a pair 
of short lines, the two words of chief importance begin with the 
same letter, and, in the second line of the pair, the chief word 
begins also with that letter, that is to say, if the alliteration 
is of consonants ; in the case of vowels the rule is reversed, 
— the chief words begin with vowels that are different. 



CHAPTER III. 
FIRST ENGLISH PROSE. 

1. The Venerable Bede.— 2. Alcuin and John Scotus Erigena. — 3. King Alfred.— 
4. Ethehvold and Dunstan. — 5. Progress in England. — 6. jElfric. — 7. Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle. 

1. As Cseclmon marches at the head of the long line of Eng- 
lish poets, so the Venerable Bede leads the still longer line 
of English prose-writers. This wise and saintty man, born in 
673, was a child in arms when Csedmon sang the power of the 
Creator and his counsel, and the young Aldhelm had begun his 
work at Malmesbuiy. When seven years old, — that is to say, 
about the time of the death of Abbess Hilda, — Bede was placed 
in the newly-founded monastery of St. Peter, at Wearmouth. 
Three } T ears later the associated monastery of St.- Paul was 
opened at Jarrow, on the banks of the T3 T ne, about five miles 
distant from St. Peter's. Bede, then aged ten, was transferred 
to the Jarrow monastery. There he spent his life, punctual in 
all formal exercises of devotion, and employing his whole lei- 
sure, pen in hand, for the advancement of true knowledge. He 
digested and arranged the teaching of the fathers of the church, 
that others might with the least possible difficult}?- study the 
Scriptures by the light they gave. He produced, in a Latin 
treatise on " The Nature of Things," a text-book of the sci- 
ence of his day, digested and compacted out of mairy volumes. 
His works are almost an enc} T clop8edia of the knowledge of his 
time. He drew it from many sources, where it lay hidden in 
dull, voluminous, or inaccessible books ; and he set it forth in 
books which could be used in the monastery schools, or be read 
by the educated for their own further instruction. The fame of 
the devout and simple-minded English scholar spread beyond 
England. A pope in vain desired to have him brought to 
Rome. He refused in his own monaster}- the dignity of abbot, 

22 



A.D. 670.] BEDE. 23 

because "the office demands household care; and household 
care brings with it distraction of mind, which hinders the pur- 
suit of learning." He was thus at work in his monastery, 
thirty-six years old, at the time of the death of Aldhelm. 

In 731, in his fifty-ninth, year, Bede finished the most im- 
portant of his works, that known as his " Ecclesiastical His- 
tory." That History of the English Church was virtually a 
history of England brought down to the date of its completion, 
and based upon inquiries made with the true spirit of a histo- 
rian. Bede did not doubt reported miracles ; and that part of 
the religious faith of his time supplies details which we should 
be glad now to exchange for other information upon matters 
whereof he gives too bare a chronicle ; but, whatever its de- 
fects, he has left us a history of the earl}' years of England, — 
succinct, yet often warm with life ; business-like and yet childlike 
in its tone ; at once practical and spiritual, simply just, and the 
work of a true scholar, breathing love to God and man. We 
owe to Bede alone the knowledge of much that is most interest- 
ing in our early history. Where other authorities are cited, 
they are often writers, who, on the points in question, know no 
more than Bede had told them. Bede died in the year 735, 
four years after the completion of his History. He wrote in 
Latin, then the language of all scholars ; but in his last days, 
under painful illness, he was urging forward a translation into 
English of the Gospel of St. John. One of his pupils said to 
him, when the end was near, " Most dear master, there is still 
one chapter wanting ; do you think it troublesome to be asked 
airy more questions? " He answered, " It is no trouble. Take 
your pen and make read}', and write fast." Afterwards, says 
the pupil, who gave, in a letter that remains to us, the narrative 
of Bede's last days, when the dying scholar had been taking 
leave of his brethren in the monastery, and bequeathing among 
them his little wealth of pepper, napkins, and incense, " the boy 
said, ' Dear master, there is yet one sentence not written.' He 
answered, ' Write quickly.' Soon after the boy said, ' The sen- 
tence is now written.' He replied, ' It is well. You have said 
the truth. It is ended. Receive my head into your hands ; for 
it is a great satisfaction to me to sit facing my holy place, where 



24 MANUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

I was wont to pray, that I may also, sitting, call upon my 
Father.' And thus on the payement of his little cell, singing 
' Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost,' 
when he had named the Holy Spirit he breathed his last, and so 
departed into the heayenly kingdom. ' ' 

2. After Bede's death there were in England two great 
scholars, who by their writings made themselves famous over 
all Europe : these were Alcuin, who died in 804, and John 
Scotus Erigena, who died about 884. These men did much 
to advance learning and to quicken thought in England ; but as 
their writings were in Latin, and not in English, their connection 
with English literature was only indirect. 
/ 3. The chief prosperity of First English prose gathers about 
the name and reign of the great King Alfred. Thirteen 
years before the death of Erigena, that is in 871, Alfred be- 
came King of England ; and at that time the same races, 
which, by their settlements three or four centuries earlier, had 
laid the foundations of England, were again descending on the 
coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic. They spread their 
ravages from Friesland to Aquitaine, and pushed inland b} T way 
of the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne. In Eng- 
land they were called the Danes ; in France, the Normans. In 
the autumn of 866 the Danes occupied in strength part of the 
eastern coast, and in the following spring they plundered and 
burned churches and monasteries of East Anglia. The Abbess 
Hilda's was among the monasteries burned in 867. 

In 876, when Alfred, aged twenty-seven, had been for five 
years an unlucky king, with Healfdene strong at the head of 
his Danes in the north of England, and Guthrum in the south, 
Rolf (called also Rollo and Rou) entered the Seine. He 
and his brother Gorm had, like others, contended with their 
own king at home. Gorm had been killed, and Rolf had gone 
into independent exile as a bold adventurer by sea. He had 
sought prizes in England and Belgium before he went up the 
Seine, and was then invited to take peaceful occupation of 
Rouen. In 879 King Alfred obtained peace \>y his treaty with 
Guthrum. Thirty-two years afterwards, in 911, the land of the 
Normans, afterwards called Normand}', was }ielded to Rollo 
and his followers. 



To A.D. io65.] ALFRED. 25 

Thus we see that King Alfred, in his struggle with the Danes, 
was battling only with one part of a great movement akin to 
that which had first brought the English into Britain ; and that 
the foundation of Normandy, about ten 3*ears after King Alfred's 
death, is but another of its incidents, although an incident of 
first importance in the histoiy of Europe. 

King Alfred, having secured some peace with the new settlers 
on his coast, proceeded to restore strength to his people with 
the help of the best advisers he could gather to his court. 
Churches and monasteries had suffered for their wealth ; but 
their plunder and destruction meant also destruction of their 
schools. "There are only a few," said Alfred, "on this side 
of the Humber, who can understand the divine service, or even 
translate a Latin letter into English, and I believe not many 
on the other side of the Humber either. The}' are so few, in- 
deed, that I cannot remember one south of the Thames when I 
began to reign." Alfred re-established monasteries, and took 
pains to make them efficient centres of education for his people. 
Partly because the knowledge of Latin had to be recovered, 
partly because good knowledge is most widel}' diffused through 
a land when it is written in the language of the people, Alfred 
made, or caused to be made for him, translations of the books- 
which had been most valued when they were among the Latin 
text-books of the days of Bede and Alcnin. One of these was 
Bede's " Ecclesiastical Histoiy," or History of England, trans- 
lated into English without any of the added information with 
which it could have been enriched. Perhaps a reverence for 
Bede's work caused Alfred to present it to his countiymen 
without change or addition. 

The same feeling would not stand in the way of a free hand- 
ling of tk The Universal History " of Orosius. This had been 
the accepted manual in monastery schools, for general history 
from the creation to A.D. 416. Its author was a Spanish con- 
troversial Christian of the fifth century, and it was written at 
the suggestion of St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was 
himself writing " De Civitate Dei" to sustain the faith of 
Christians who had seen Alaric sack Pome, by showing from 
church history that the preaching of the Gospel could not add 



26 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

to the world's miser}'. He suggested to Orosius, who just then 
came to consult him on some question of heresy, that he might 
show from profane histoiy the same thing for the re-assurance 
of the faithful. Orosius produced, therefore, in Latin, a dull 
book, written, as Pope Gelasius I. said, "with wonderful 
brevity against heathen perversions," and it became in the 
monastery schools the chief manual of universal history. King 
Alfred, in giving a free translation of it to his people, cleared 
the book of church controversy, omitted, altered, and added, 
with the sole purpose of producing a good summary of general 
histoiy and geograplry. 

King Alfred's other work in aid of a right knowledge of his- 
tory was, probably, the establishment of that national record of 
events which was kept afterwards for a long time from 3-ear to 
year, and is now commonly known as "The Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle." It begins, after a brief account of Britain, with 
Csesai^s invasion ; is in its earlier details obviously a compila- 
tion, and that chiefly from Bede, but begins to give fuller de- 
tails after the year 853 ; and so, from a date within Alfred's 
lifetime, begins to take rank with Bede as one of the great 
sources of information on the earl}' histoiy of England. It 
may be supposed, that, for the keeping of this annual record 
of the nation's life, local events were reported at the head- 
quarters of some one monastery in which was a monk com- 
missioned to act as historiographer ; that, at the end of each 
year, this monk set down what he thought most wortlry to be 
remembered, and that he then had transcripts of his brief note 
made in the scriptorium of his monastery, and forwarded to 
other houses for addition to the copies kept by them of the 
great year-book of the nation. Geoffrej r Gahnar, writing in 
the twelfth century, says that King Alfred had at Winchester a 
copy of a chronicle fastened by a chain ; so that all who wished 
might read. In some such way as this "The Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle ' ' was kept up until the time of the Norman con- 
quest, and for three generations after that. Its last record is 
of the accession of Hemy II. in the 3-ear 1154. 

King Alfred not only tried to make his countiymen ac- 
quainted with the world in which they lived, but he sought 



To A.D. 1066.] ALFRED. 27 

also to aid each in acquiring a firm rule over the world within 
himself. For this reason he turned into English the famous 
Latin work of Boethius, the last man of genius produced by 
ancient Rome. Boethius, a Roman senator, lost the favor of 
Theodoric by a love for his country, which his enemies called 
treason ; was imprisoned, and from prison led to execution, 
about the year 525. In prison he wrote his noble work called 
"The Consolation of Philosophy," in five books of prose, 
mixed with verse. The first of its five books recognized as the 
great source of consolation that a wise God rules the world ; 
the second argued that man in his worst extremity possesses 
much, and ought to fix his mind on the imperishable ; the third 
maintained that God is the chief good, and works no evil ; 
the fourth, that, as seen from above, only the good are happy ; 
and the fifth sought to reconcile God's knowledge of what is 
necessaiy with the free-will of mankind. The charm of a philo- 
sophic mind expressed through a pure strain of natural piety 
had made this dialogue between Philosophy and the Prisoner so 
popular, that the church justified its use of the volume in schools 
by claiming Boethius as a Christian martyr. He was canonized 
as a saint in the eighth centur}', though in his book he turns 
from the depth of worldly calamity to explore all sources of 
true consolation, and does not name Christ. Alfred believed, 
as he was told, that Boethius suifered as a Christian under 
Theodoric, and told it again when he gave "The Consolation 
of Philosoplry " in English to his people. 

King Alfred also, with the same desire to give men inward 
strength, translated into English a famous book by Pope Greg- 
ory the Great. This book, known as the " Regula Pastoralis," 
showing what the mind of a true spiritual pastor ought to be, 
was made English as " Gregory's Book on the Care of the Soul." 
It is in the preface to this that King Alfred tells of the decay 
of learning in his kingdom, and of his desire for its true resto- 
ration. 

We cannot know with certainty whether much of the work 
ascribed to King Alfred was done by his own hand, or whether 
he may rather be said to have encouraged, by strong fel- 
lowship in industry, the labors of those good men whom he 



28 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670 

gathered to his court, and who worked under his direction, 
giving and receiving counsel, for the furtherance of his most 
royal enterprise. What we do know with certainty assures us, 
that, although King Alfred lived a thousand years ago, a thou- 
sand years hence, if there be England then, his memory will 
3 T et be precious to his country. / 

4. There is little to be said of our First English literature 
after the time of King Alfred, who died in 901. Two devout 
ecclesiastics, Ethelwold and Dunstan, sought to reform 
monastic life by putting more purity and zeal into it ; and, in 
the prosecution of this work, Ethelwold translated into Eng- 
lish Benedict's " Rule of a Monastic Life." Dunstan wrote an 
adaptation of the same rule for the use of English monks, and 
also a large " Commentary on the Benedictine Rule," doubt- 
less from notes of the lectures given by him to his pupils in 
the monastery schools. Some fragments of First English in the. 
chapter library at Gloucester have been partly published in 
facsimile as "Gloucester Fragments," and include a detail of 
miracles that preceded and directed the dedication, by Arch- 
bishop Dunstan, of Ethelwold' s restored Cathedral of Win- 
chester. 

5. No vigor of independent genius was developed by this 
movement towards greater strictness of monastic rule. The 
best intellectual effort among us in the century following the 
death of Alfred took the same direction. Earnest and religious 
men felt in their youth an enthusiasm stirred by the re-founding 
of those monasteries in which they were trained ; and, looking 
only to the farthest limit of their little world, they devoutly 
sought to raise their country b}^ putting purer and intenser life 
into the men who were its teachers. But the nation was ad- 
vancing, through much stir of blood, into a new age of its 
life, and could be little helped by a fixed reproduction of past 
forms. 

Alfred's grandson, Athelstan, attacked by Danes from Ire- 
land and Danes of the north of England, with allies from 
among the Gael and Cymry, overcame his enemies in the 3-ear 
937 at the great battle of Brunanburh. Trouble with Danes 
continued, till there was more quiet in the reign of Edgar, who 



To A.D. 1066.] &LFRIC. 29 

began to rule at the age of sixteen, and from the outset of his 
reign took Dunstan for chief counsellor. Edgar, therefore, 
supported the great efforts made for a revival of monasticism. 
He died in the year 975, after sixteen years of rule, and was 
called Lord of the whole Isle of Albion. Blending of all con- 
stituents of the great nation of the future was still going on. 
An England had been formed, and now came the foreshadowing 
of a Great Britain. The days of the first generations of Eng- 
glish are therefore drawing to a close. 

Meanwhile Denmark, Sweden, and Norway had grown also 
into compact powers ; and in the reign of Ethelred the Unready 
England was not merely disturbed hy the Danes settled on her 
shores, but had to face their power as invaders. In the year 
994 they attacked Ipswich, ravaged the surrounding country, 
and were met unsuccessfully at Maldon in Essex by the patriotic 
bands which had been trained and led by BjThtnoth, who fell 
in the battle. 

6. These were the days of outward tumult, in which iElfric 
wrote his " Homilies." iElfric was one of the first pupils of 
Ethel wold at Abingdon. When Ethelwold became Bishop of 
Winchester, iElfric acted as chief of the teachers in his diocese, 
and wrote for the use of schools a lively little book of Latin 
"Colloquy." It was afterwards enlarged and republished b} r 
iElfric Bata, who had himself been taught Latin by it at Win- 
chester. Latin being in his time, and long before and after, 
spoken and written as the common language of the learned, 
colloquy was a common way of teaching. iElfric represents 
in his dialogue pupils who beg to be taught, answering ques- 
tions as to their respective trades ; and thus he brings out in 
a few pages a very large number of words that would be used 
b}' them in talk over the daily business of life. iElfric wrote 
also for his pupils a " Glossary " in Latin and English. He 
was removed from Winchester to the Abbe}' of Cerne in Dorset- 
shire by the wish of its founder, and there it was, that, at the 
request of the founder's son, iElfric produced his " Homilies," 
compiled and translated from the Fathers, in two sets each of 
forty sermons. The first set was completed in the year 990, 
and is a harmony of the opinions of the Fathers on all points 



80 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 670. 

of faith as the English Church of his time accepted them. It 
was made public by the authority of Sigeric, then Archbishop 
of Canterbury. The other set tells of the saints whom the 
church then revered. JElfric also began a translation, in 
abridgment, of the Bible into English, and completed in this 
way the whole Pentateuch, as well as the Book of Job. Thus 
iElfric is to be remembered as the first man who translated into 
English prose any considerable portion of the Bible. 

7. It has already been mentioned that the great national" 
record of English history, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 
was established in King Alfred's time, and continued to be 
written, year by year, until almost a century after the Norman 
Conquest. With this work, representing both prose and poetry, 
the story of First English literature, therefore, comes to an end. 



Paet II. 

TRANSITIONAL ENGLISH 
1066-1350. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



PERIOD OF TRANSITIONAL ENGLISH 
1066-1350. 



ENGLISH WRITERS IN LATIN AND IN 
FRENCH. 



William of Malmesbury. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth. 

Wace. 

Ralph Higden. 

"Walter Map. 

Ssewulf. 

Hilarius. 

Athelard of Bath. 



Alexander Neckham. 
Roger Bacon. 
Ralph Glanville. 
Henry of Bracton. 
Nigel Wireker. 
Robert Grosseteste. 
Richard de Bury. 



WRITERS IN TRANSITIONAL ENGLISH. 



Layamon. 
Orm. 

Nicholas of Guildford. 
Authors of Metrical Creeds, 
Paternosters, Gaudia, etc. 
Thomas of Erceldoune. 



Robert of Gloucester. 
Robert of Brunne. 
Laurence Minot. 
Richard Rolle. 
Ralph Higden. 






/ 



CHAPTER I. 

WRITINGS OF ENGLISHMEN IN LATIN AND IN 
FRENCH. 

1. The English Language before and after the Norman Conquest. — 2. Writings in 
Latin and in French. — 3. Chronicles. — 4. William of Malmesbury. — 5. Gcof- 
frej of Monmouth. — 6. Wace . — 7. A Group of Minor Chroniclers. — S. Ralph 
Higden. — 9. Romances; Walter Map. — 10. Other Romance- Writers. — 11. 
Ssewulf. — 12. Hilarius. — 13. Miracle-Plays and Mysteries. — 14. Writers on 
Science; Athelard of Bath. — 15. Alexander Neckham. — 16. Roger Bacon.— 
17. Writers on Law; Ralph Glanville; Henry of Bracton. — 18. Religious 
Discussion; English Debate concerning Authority. — 19. Nigel Wireker.— 
20. Robert Grosseteste. — 21. Richard de Bury. 



1. During the four centuries from Caedmon to the Conquest 
•the language of books written in English may be said to have 
been fixed. Among the First English themselves, mixtures of 
race and tribe from the Continent varied in different parts of 
the country, and in each place the constituents and the propor- 
tions of the mixture were shown by the form of speech. Pro- 
vincial dialects were thus established. Then, as now, the 
spoken language of the county had its local differences, only 
more strongly marked than the}' now are ; and the untaught mul- 
titude was careless about grammar ; while the cultivated class, 
which produced books, maintained in them a standard of the 
language, being careful to preserve accuracy in use of inflection, 
discrimination of gender, and upon all other such points. Even 
the vocabulary of First English literature remained for those four 
centuries very uniform ; so that, with a few traces of provin- 
cialism which may point towards the birthplace of a writer, and 
perhaps some looseness of grammar towards the close of the 
period, during the four centuries of First English literature, all 
English thought written in English ma}' be said to have come 
down to us in one language as fixed as that which we now speak. 

But, during the three centuries from the Conquest to the time 
of Chaucer, there was continuous change. The language then 

33 



34 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. io65 

was in transition to the later form, in which, again, it became 
fixed. In race the Normans were another combination of the 
English elements. Even the part of France on which they had 
established themselves was Teutonized before they came to it ; 
for it was that which had in Caesar's time a population traceable 
to a Teutonic immigration, and to which there had come in the 
fifth century the Franks, — Teutons again. As far as concerned 
race only, there was quite as much of original kindred in the 
blood of those whom we call Normans and Saxons as between 
fellow-Englishmen now living in Yorkshire and in Hampshire. 
Bat the energetic Normans had been drawing, for the subsequent 
advantage of the world, their own separate lessons from the 
school of life. The} T had dropped in France their own language ; 
their sons learnt speech of the mothers found in the new coun- 
try, and, when they first came over to England as rulers, gave 
kings who spoke only French, ecclesiastics whom their kings 
could trust, French-speaking abbots at the head of the monas- 
teries (which were the only conservators of knowledge and cen- 
tres of education), and French-speaking knights in their castles, 
as centres of influence among the native rural population. 

French was the language of the ruling class in Church and 
State. Latin was used in books habitually as the common 
language of the educated throughout Europe, — the only lan- 
guage in which a scholar might hope to address, not merely the 
few among a single people, but the whole republic of letters. 
English remained the language of the people, and its predomi- 
nance was sure. 

But there was no longer in the monasteries a cultivated class 
maintaining a standard of the language. The common people 
were not strict in care of genders and inflections. Those new- 
comers who sought to make themselves understood in English 
helped also to bring old niceties of inflection to decay. At the 
same time old words were modified, and some were dropped, 
when their places were completely taken by convenient new 
words that formed part of the large vocabulary wherewith our 
language was now being enriched. In large towns change was 
continuous and somewhat rapid ; in country districts it was 
slow. Thus, while the provincial distinctions all remained, local 



To A.D. 1350.] CHRONICLES. 35 

conditions, here advancing, there retarding, the new movement, 
caused increase of difference between the forms of speech current 
in England at one time. 

2. In the years next following the Conquest the chief authors 
were ecclesiastics, and their language Latin. The books were 
usually chronicles and lives of saints ; but there was represen- 
tation also of the love of travel, and already a faint indication 
of the new spirit of free inquiry that was to break the bonds of 
ancient science. Not until the time of King John, who began 
his reign just a hundred and thirty-three years after the Con- 
quest, did books in English begin to appear. During all that 
time, nearly all writing of mark had been in Latin ; and those 
books which were not in Latin were in French. Indeed for 
more than a hundred years after the reign of John, and quite 
down to the end of our period of Transitional English, the larger 
part of the literature written in England was in Latin and in 
French rather than in English. This huge mass of writings 
produced in England from the middle of the eleventh centuiy to 
the middle of the fourteenth, but produced in some other lan- 
guage than that of England, cannot be regarded as English 
literature. We need not here concern ourselves with these 
writings, except so far as the} r illustrate the condition of Eng- 
lish thought at that time, or as they stand for the origin of 
literaiy movements which revealed themselves, then and after- 
ward, in literature that is English. Under this limitation let 
us glance rapidly over the Latin and French writings that were 
produced in England during the three centuries now under 
consideration. . 

3. Perhaps the most interesting and valuable portion of them 
are the Chronicles, which during all this period were writ- 
ten by ecclesiastics, and generally b}- monks. 

The history-making Normans gave from the first much occu- 
pation for the pen of the good monk in his scriptorium. In 
that room he copied the desirable things that were not bought 
for the monastic libraiw, — works of the Fathers, writings in 
defence of orthodox belief ; a good book on the right computa- 
tion of Easter ; a treatise on each of the seven steps of knowl- 
edge which led up to theology, namely, grammar, rhetoric, and 



36 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

logic, forming the trivium of ethics, with arithmetic, geome- 
try, music, and astronomy, the quadrivium of physics. There 
would be need also of a fresher histor}- than Orosius could fur- 
nish. The framer of such a histoiy might begin with Adam, 
and cause any short sketch of the history of the world from 
the creation to be copied, or a larger history to be reduced in 
scale. As he proceeded towards his own time, he would give 
out now this, now that, accepted history of a particular period, 
to be copied literally, or condensed. But when he came down 
to a time within his own memory, or that of men about him, he 
began to tell his story for himself, and spoke from living knowl- 
edge ; from this point, therefore, his chronicle became for after- 
times an independent record of great value. In da} T s when the 
strong sought conquest, and lands often changed masters, the 
monasteries, with wide-spread possessions, had reason to keep 
themselves well informed in the history-making of the great 
lords of the soil. The chronicle, which faithfully preserved 
a record of events in the surrounding world during the years 
last past, would be one of the best read and most useful books 
in the monastic library. Monasteries were many, and the num- 
ber also of the chroniclers was great. In England the}?- were 
usually men whose hearts were with the people to whom they 
belonged. Not brilliant, like those chroniclers of France who 
gave their souls up to outside enjoyment of court glitter and 
the pomp of war, but sober and accurate recorders of such matter 
as concerned realities of life, they saw in England the home of 
a people, not the playground of a king. 

4. Of all this great throng of chroniclers, the best are these 
three, — William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and 
Wace, sometimes miscalled Robert Wace. 

William of Malmesbury, who almost rose from the 
chronicler into the historian, was born probably about the year 
1095 ; and of his parents one was English, and one Norman. 
He went as a boy into the monastery at Malmesbury ; was 
known there as an enthusiast for books ; sought, bought, and 
read them ; and gave all the intervals between religious exer- 
cises to his active literary work. He was made librarian at 
Malmesbuiy, and would not be made abbot. His chief work, 



To A.D. 1350.] GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. 37 

"De Gestis Regum " ("History of the Kings of England"), 
is in five books, beginning with the arrival of the First English 
in 449, reaching to the Norman Conquest by the close of book 
ii., giving the third book to William the Conqueror, the fourth 
to William Rufus, and the fifth to Hemy I., as far as the twen- 
tieth 3'ear of his reign. Under a separate title, " Historia No- 
vella" ("Modern History"), William, at the request of Robert 
of Gloucester, continued his record of current events, in three 
short books, to the year 1142, where he broke off in the story 
of the contest of his patron, the Earl of Gloucester, with King 
Stephen, at Matilda's escape over the ice from Oxford to Wal- 
lingford. " This," he said, " I purpose describing more fully, 
if, b} T God's permission, I shall ever learn the truth of it from 
those who were present." As he wrote no more, the time of 
William of Malmesbuiy's death is inferred from the date of the 
conclusion of his history, 1142, when his age was about forty- 
seven. So able a scholar had, of course, many commissions 
from the other monasteries to produce lives of their saints. He 
wrote also in four books " De Gestis Pontificum " ("History 
of the Prelates of England "). 

5. Five years after William of Malmesbmy had ceased to 
write, Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his " Chronicon 
sive Historia Britonum " ("H'istor}- of British Kings"). As 
his predecessor William had brought chronicle-writing to per- 
fection, so Geoffrey, out of the form of the chronicle, produced 
the spirit that was to animate new forms of literature, and 
opened a spring of poetiy that we find running through, the 
fields of English literature in all after-time. 

Geoffrey was a Welsh priest, in whom there was blood of the 
Cymry quickening his genius. He had made a translation of 
the " Prophecies of Merlin," when, as he tells us, Walter Cale- 
nius, Archdeacon of Oxford, found in Brittany an ancient 
history of Britain, written in the C\'mric tongue. He knew no 
man better able to translate it than Geoffrey of Monmouth, who 
had credit as an elegant writer cf Latin verse and prose. 
Geoffrey undertook the task, and formed accordingly his "His- 
tory of British Kings" in four books, dedicated to Robert, Earl 
of Gloucester. Afterwards he made alterations, and formed the 



88 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1066 

work into eight books, to which he added "Merlin's Prophe- 
cies," translated out of Cj'mric verse into Latin prose. The 
histoiy, as finally completed Iry him in 1147, is in twelve books, 
and the whole work was a romance of histoiy, taking the grave 
form of authentic chronicle. GeofFre} T closed his budget with a 
playful reference to more exact historians, to whom he left the 
deeds of the Saxons, but whom he advised " to be silent about 
the kings of the Britons, since thej' have not that book in the 
British language, which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought 
out of Brittany." There is a sly vein of banter in this refer- 
ence to the mysterious book upon which Geoffrey fathered 
his ingenious invention of a list of British kings who did won- 
derful deeds, gave their names to this place and that, reigned 
each of them exactly so many 3-ears and months, and made an 
unbroken series from Brut, great-grandson of ./Eneas, through 
King Arthur, to Cadwallo, who died in the j^ear 689. " It was 
Somebody who said it, not I." We first read, in this fiction, of 
Sabrina, "virgin daughter of Locrine ; " of Gorboduc, whose 
stoiy was the theme of the earliest English tragedy ; of Lear 
and his daughter ; and, above all, of King Arthur as the 
recognized hero of a national romance. Geoffre3 T obtained the 
b3 T -name of Arturus, and was said to have " made the little 
finger of his Arthur stouter than the back of Alexander the 
Great." So wrote a painstaking, unimaginative chronicler of 
the next generation, William of Newbury, who, considering 
" how saucily and how shamelessly he lies almost throughout," 
and not caring to specify " how much of the acts of the Britons 
before Julius Csesar that man invented, or wrote from the in- 
ventions of others as if authentic," said of Geoffrey, "As in all 
things we trust Bede, whose wisdom and sincerhy are be3'ond 
doubt ; so that fabler with his fables shall be straightway spat 
out by us all." Far from it. The regular chronicler was scan- 
dalized at the pretensions of a perfectly new form of literature, 
a work of fanc3 r dressed in the form of one of his own faithful 
records of events. But the work stirred men's imaginations. — 
6. The two chroniclers just mentioned wrote their books in 
Latin ; but the chronicler now to be spoken of, Wace, wrote 
his most important book in French. He was born at Jerse3% 



To A.D. 1350. J RALPH HIGDEX. 39 

educated at Caen, and was a reading-clerk and a romance- 
writer at Caen in the latter part of Stephen's reign. He shared 
the enthusiasm with which men of bright imagination received 
Geoffrey of Monmouth's tw Chronicle," and reproduced it as a 
French metrical romance, the "Brut," in more than 15,000 
lines. Sometimes he translated closely, sometimes paraphrased, 
sometimes added fresh legends from Brittany, or fresh inven- 
tions of his own. His work was completed in 1155, immedi- 
ately after the accession of Henry II., who gave him a prebend 
at Bayeux. "NVace afterwards amplified a Latin chronicle of 
the deeds of William the Conqueror, by William of Poitiers, 
that king's chaplain, into a " Roman de Rou." But there was 
no continuance of royal favor ; and he died, unprosperous, in 
England, probably in 1184. 

7. Although these three chroniclers are the most noteworthy, it may 
be well to place here at least the names of others of less importance. 
They are Turgot, who wrote a " Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae; " 
Florence of Worcester, who wrote " Chronicon ex Chronicis ab Initio 
Mundi usque ad Annum Christi 1117 deductum;" Eadmer of Canter- 
bury, who wrote "Historia Novorum;" Alfred of Beverley, who wrote 
an abridgment of Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Chronicle;" Geoffrey 
Gaimar, who wrote a French metrical translation of the same " Chroni- 
cle," and added to it the series of Saxon kings; Henry of Huntingdon, 
who wrote a "Chronicon" in eight books; William of Newbury, who 
wrote "Historia Eerum Anglicarum ; " Roger of Hoveden, who wrote 
"Annales," from 732, where Bede left off, to 1201; Gerald of Wales, 
otherwise called Gerald du Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote 
" Expugnatio Hibemise;" Roger of Wendover, who wrote " Flores His- 
toriarum;" Matthew Paris, who wrote "Historia Major;" John of 
Oxnead, who wrote a " Chronicon" from 449 to 1292; Nicholas Trivet, 
who wrote " Annales Sex Regum Angliae," ending in 1307; Peter Lang- 
toft, who wrote in French verse a "Chronicle of England," ending in 
the same year; John of Trokelowe, who wrote "Annales," from 1307 
to 1323; and Robert of Avesbury, who wrote " De Mirabilibus Gestis 
Edwardi III.," ending with 1356. 

8. This long series of chronicles written by Englishmen, 
chiefly in Latin, is fittingly closed in the " Poly chronicon," 
written in Latin by Ralph Higden, a Benedictine monk, who, 
in his earlier life, is thought to have written the. first miracle- 
plays in English. His " Poly chronicon," in seven books, 
was so called, he saj's, because it gave the chronicle of mairy 



40 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

times. Its first book described the countries of the known 
world, especially Britain ; its second book gave the history 
of the world from the creation to Xebuchadnezzar ; the next 
book closed with the birth of Christ ; the fourth book carried 
on the chronicle to the arrival of the Saxons in England ; 
the fifth proceeded to the invasion of the Danes ; the sixth, 
to the Tsorman Conquest ; and the seventh, to Higden's own 
time in the reign of Edward III., his latest date being the 3-ear 
1342. He died about 1363 ; and long after his death the 
" Polychronicon " stood in high credit as a sketch of universal 
history, with special reference to England. 

9. It is but a short step from the chronicles of this period to its 
romances ; and of these, the most beautiful as well as the most 
important are those which ma}' be grouped together under the 
name of the Arthurian romances. Geoffre}' of Monmouth's 
' ' Chronicle ' ' had suddenl}' made King Arthur famous in Eng- 
land. Trace's version of the stories relating to Arthur had 
quickened the popular interest in his adventures ; when it oc- 
curred to a very brilliant and very earnest man, named Wal- 
ter Map, to arrange and harmonize all these exquisite tales, 
and to put a Christian soul into them. This service of Walter 
Map's has had enormous influence upon English thought and 
English literature down to the present moment ; and it is right 
that we should now stop and make some special stud}* of a man 
so distinguished. Walter Map, sometimes called Mapes, had, 
like GeofFre}* of Monmouth, Celtic blood in his veins. Born 
about the year 1143, on the borders of Wales, he called the 
Welsh his countiymen, and England "our mother." He 
studied in the University of Paris, which was then in the first 
da}'s of its fame. After his studies there, he came home, and 
was at court, in attendance on King Hemy II., whom he after- 
ward served as judge, as militaiy chaplain, as ambassador to 
the French king, and as delegate to the Lateran Council of 
1179. After his return from Koine, Map was made a canon 
of St. Paul's, and also precentor of Lincoln. He held also the 
parsonage of Westbuiy in Gloucestershire, but still was in 
attendance on the king, and especially' attached to the young 
Prince Henrv after he had been crowned bv his father. In the 



To A.D. 1350.] WALTER MAP. 41 

reign of Richard I., and the year 1196, when his age was about 
fifty- three, Map was made Archdeacon of Oxford ; but bej'ond 
that date nothing is known of him. 

Walter Map was a bright man of the world, with a high pur- 
pose in his life ; poet and wit, a spiritual man of genius. He 
fought with his own weapons against the prevalent corruption 
of the clergy. While he was at court, there began to pass from 
hand to hand copies of Latin verse purporting to be poems of a 
certain Bishop Golias, a gluttonous dignitary, glorying in self- 
indulgence, — his name probably derived from gula, the gullet. 
The verses were audacious, lively, and so true to the assumed 
character, that some believed them to come really from a shame- 
less bishop. Here was the corruption of the Church personified, 
and made a bj T -word among men. The poems gave a new word 
to the language, — " goliard." Walter Map Avas the creator of 
this character ; but the keen satire of his lively Latin verse 
bred imitators, and Father Golias soon had many sons. A 
fashion for Golias poetiy sprang up, and then the earnest man 
of genius had fellow-laborers in plenty. 

Another of Map's books was " De Nugis Curialium " (" On 
the Trifles of Courtiers"). He had been asked, he says, by 
a friend, Geoffre}*, to write something, as a philosopher and 
poet, courtly and pleasant. He replied that poetical invention 
needs a quiet, concentrated mind, and that this was not to be 
had in the turmoil of a court. But he did accept a lighter com- 
mission, and " would endeavor to set down in a book whatever 
he had seen or heard that seemed to him worth note, and that 
had not yet been written ; so that the telling should be pleasant, 
and the instruction should tend to moralit}*." His work, there- 
fore, which is in five divisions, is a volume of trustworthy con- 
temporaiy anecdote by the man who knew better than any other 
what was worth observing. There is no pedantry at all, no 
waste of words. There is not a fact or story that might not 
have been matter of table-talk at Hemy's court. Anecdotes on 
subjects allied to one another are generally arranged together ; 
but there is a new topic in ever}- chapter, and the work is a 
miscellany rich in illustration of its time, and free enough in 
its plan to admit any fact, or opinion, or current event, worth 



42 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

record. It includes bold speaking against crusading zeal that 
left home-duties unperformed, against the vices of the court of 
Rome, even against that vice in the kings of England which 
caused their people to be oppressed by unjust game-laws. Under 
this head King Henry II. is himself the subject of a warning 
anecdote. 

But Map's great work was that which justified his friend 
Geoffrey in demanding of him " something as a philosopher and 
poet." He it was who first gave a soul to the King Arthur 
legends, and from whom we elate the beginning of a spiritual 
harmony between the life of the English people and the forms 
given to the national hero by our poets. The Latin races have 
made no such use of Charlemagne or Eoland as we shall find 
the English to have made of the King Arthur myth. The cycle 
of the Charlemagne romances offers a wide field for study, 
bright with life and color derived from the active genius of the 
trouveres. But these tales remain what those of the Arthurian 
cycle were before the genius of Walter Map had harmonized 
them with the spirit of his country. The old tales were tales 
of animal strength, courage, and passion ; the spiritual life 
was added to them when Walter Map placed in the midst of 
them the Holy Graal, type of the heavenly nxysteries ; and that 
legend itself became the first piece in the series of prose 
romances, now produced and written to be read aloud, forming 
the groundwork on which metrical romances afterwards were 
based. 

The series begins with "The Eomance of the Holy Graal," some- 
times also called " The Romance of Joseph of Arimathasa." The Graal, 
according to its legend, was the holy dish (low Latin, gradale) which 
contained the paschal lamb at the Last Supper. After the supper it was 
taken by a Jew to Pilate, who gave it to Joseph of Arimathsea. It was 
used by Joseph of Arimathsea at the taking down of our Lord from the 
cross, to receive the gore from his wounds ; and thus it became doubly 
sacred. When the Jews imprisoned Joseph, the Holy Graal, placed 
miraculously in his hands, kept him from pain and hunger for two and 
forty years. Released by Vespasian, Joseph quitted Jerusalem, and 
went with the Graal through France into Britain, where it was carefully 
deposited in the treasury of one of the kings of the island, called the 
"Fisherman King." The second romance in the series is that of " Mer- 
lin : " the third is that of "Lancelot of the Lake." In the latter, 



To A.D. 1350.] ROMANCES OF ARTHUR. 43 

while developing the Arthur legend, Map idealized that bright animal 
life which it had been the only object of preceding stories to express. 
The romance is rich in delicate poetical invention. Lancelot is the 
bright pattern of a knight according to the flesh, cleared in one respect 
of many scattered offences, which are concentrated in a single blot, repre- 
sented always as a dark blot on his character, — the unlawful love for 
Guinevere. Next in the series comes the romance of " The Quest of the 
Holy Graal." From Lancelot, who had been painted as the ornament 
of an unspiritual chivalry, Map caused a son to spring, Sir Galahad, the 
spiritual knight, whose dress of flame-color mystically typified the Holy 
Spirit that came down in tongues of fire. ' The son and namesake of 
Joseph of Arimathaea, Bishop Joseph, to whom the holy dish was 
bequeathed, first instituted the order of the Round Table. The initiated, 
at their festivals, sat as apostle knights, with the Holy Ghost in the midst 
of them, leaving one seat vacant as that which the Lord had occupied, and 
which was reserved for the pure Galahad. Whatever impure man sat 
there the earth swallowed. It was called, therefore, the " Seat Perilous." 
When men became sinful, the Holy Graal, visible only to pure eyes, 
disappeared. On its recovery (on the recovered purity of the people) 
depended the honor and peace of England; but only Sir Galahad, who 
at the appointed time was brought to the knights by a mysterious old 
man clothed in white, — only the unstained Sir Galahad succeeded in 
the quest. Throughout "The Quest of the Graal" Map knitted the 
threads of Arthurian romance into the form which it was his high pur- 
pose to give them, and made what had become the most popular tales of 
his time in England an expression of the English earnestness that seeks 
to find the right, and do it for the love of God. All their old charm is 
left, intensified, in the romance of Lancelot; but all is now for the first 
time shaped into a legend of man's spiritual battle, and a lesson on 
the search, through a pure life alone, for the full revelation of God's 
glory upon earth. After this, it remained only to complete the series 
of the romances by adding the "Mort Artus" ("The Death of Arthur"). 
The spiritual significance thus given by Walter Map to King Arthur, 
as the romance hero of the English, he is so far from having lost 
among us, that we shall find great phases in the history of English 
thought distinctly illustrated by modifications in the treatment of the 
myth. 

10. Meanwhile the demand for Arthurian romances grew; and, when 
Map's work was done, another Englishman, Luces de Gast, living near 
Salisbury, wrote, probably towards the close of Henry II.'s reign, the 
first part of "Tristan," or "Tristram." The second part was added by 
Helie de Borron. Popular as it became, this romance is, in spirit and 
execution, of inferior quality. Sir Tristram and the fair Isoude are but 
coarse doubles of Map's Lancelot and Guinevere. 

A Frenchman, Chrestien of Troyes, who began writing before the 
close of Henry II.'s reign, was, in Arthurian romance, the ablest of the 



44 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

contemporaries and immediate followers of Walter Map. He began, 
about the year 1180, with the romance of "Erec and Enide," and pro- 
duced metrical versions of Map's " Lancelot" and Graal romances. He 
wrote also the romance of "Percival le Gallois." 

Not long afterwards a German poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, fas- 
tened upon the Graal story in the true spirit of Map's work. Taking 
the sight of the Graal as the symbol of nearness to God, he painted, in 
his romance of '"Parzival," the soul of a man striving heavenward, 
erring, straying, yielding to despair, repenting, and, in deep humility, at 
last attaining its desire. The Graal, thus become famous, was said to 
be made of one emerald lost from the crown of Lucifer as he was falling 
out of heaven. 

11. A writer representing the love of travel was Saewulf, a merchant, 
the first English traveller who followed in the track of the crusaders, 
went to the East, escaped by accident from a great storm at Joppa 
which destroyed a thousand persons, and lived to produce a lively 
record in Latin of all that he saw in Palestine during the years 1102 and 
1103. When he came home, Srewulf withdrew from the world, and 
became a monk of Malmesbury, where the best of the chroniclers after 
Bede was then librarian. 

12. It was a little less than a century after the Norman Con- 
quest, that there was an Englishman in France, Eilarius, who 
had gone to be taught by Abelard at Paraclete, and from whom 
we have our earliest known miracle-plays. The acting of such 
plays seems to have been introduced into this country soon 
after the Conquest. Matthew Paris, a chronicler who lived in 
the thirteenth century, refers to a miracle-play of St. Katherine, 
written some years before 1119, \>y Geoffrey of Gorham, who 
became afterwards prior, and was in 1119 made Abbot of St. 
Albans. This is the earliest allusion to the acting of such 
pieces in this country. They had arisen out of the desire of 
the clergy to bring leading facts of Bible history and the legends 
of the saints home to the hearts of the illiterate. A great 
church was dedicated to some saint. The celebration of the 
saint's da} T was an occasion for drawing from afar, if possible, 
devout worshippers, and offerings to the shrine. Some inci- 
dents from the life of the saint, enforcing, perhaps, his power to 
help those who chose him for their patron, it was thought good 
to place at some part of the church service of the day, with 
dramatic ingenuity, before the eyes of the unlettered congrega- 
tion. 






To A. D. 1350.] MIRACLE-PLAYS. 45 

It was probably while he was living in France that Hilarius 
wrote in Latin his three miracle-plays, — "St. Nicholas," " The 
Raising of Lazarus," and " The History of Daniel." 

The first was intended to be performed in a church dedicated to St. 
Nicholas. Upon the day consecrated to that saint his image was 
removed, and a living actor, dressed to represent the statue, was placed 
in the shrine. When the pause was made in the service for the acting 
of the miracle, one came in at the church-door dressed as a rich heathen, 
deposited his treasure at the shrine, said that he was going on a journey, 
and called on the saint to be the guardian of his property. When the 
heathen had gone out, thieves entered, and silently carried off the treas- 
ure. Then came the heathen back, and furiously raged. He took a 
whip and began to thrash the image of the saint. But upon this the 
image moved, descended from its niche, went out and reasoned with 
the robbers, threatening also to denounce them to the people. Terrified 
by this miracle, the thieves returned tremblingly, and so, in silence, they 
brought every thing back. The statue was again in its niche, motion- 
less. The heathen sang his joy to a popular tune of the time, and 
turned to adore the image. Then St. Nicholas himself appeared, bid- 
ding the heathen worship God alone, and praise the name of Christ. 
The heathen was converted. The piece ended with adoration of the 
Almighty, and the church service was then continued. 

The second play, " The liaising of Lazarus,'' was intended to portray 
the mystery of the resurrection of the dead. Its incidents having been 
realized to the utmost, and its dialogues set to popular tunes of the day, 
the officiating priest, who, as Lazarus, has risen from the tomb, turns in 
that character to admonish the assembled people. He turns then to the 
representation of Jesus, whom he adores as Master, King, and Lord, who 
wipes out the sins of the people, whose ordinance is sure, and of whose 
kingdom there shall be no end. And the closing direction of the author 
is, that " this being finished, if it was played at matins, Lazarus shall 
begin ' Te Deum Laudamus ; ' but, if at vespers, ' Magnificat anima mea 
Dominum; ' " and so the church service proceeds. The last of the three 
plays by Hilarius was designed for a pompous Christmas representation 
of the story of Daniel, and at its close the church service was to be 
continued by the priest who played Darius. 

13. These crude pla}~s, written in the twelfth century, are of 
deep interest to us, as representing the earliest movements of 
the English mind in the direction of dramatic literature, and as 
being in some sense the ver} T beginning of a department of 
English literature that is now very rich and brilliant. 

It is proper that in this place the student should understand 
the meaning of two terms that frequently occur in connection 



46 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

with this early stage of our dramatic literature, — the terms 
"mystery" and " .miracle-play." The first simply meant a 
play founded on Biblical incidents, and containing Biblical 
characters ; the second meant a play founded on non-Biblical 
incidents, and containing non-Biblical characters. Thus, of the 
three plaj^s of Hilarius, that of St. Nicholas is, strictly speak- 
ing, a miracle-pla}- ; while the two devoted to Lazarus and Daniel 
are nrysteries. It should be added that these two elements 
were frequently blended in the same play, and that in England 
the term ' ' mystery ' ' was never in popular use ; while the term 
" miracle-play " was applied indiscriminately to both kinds of 
religious play. In France, on the other hand, the term mystere 
was, from the fifteenth century, given to all religious plays 
whatsoever. We shall meet, later in our studies, with a third 
species of religious play, called the " morality-play." 

14. As we have found in the Latin writings of Englishmen 
during this period the germs of the great and splendid drama 
of England, so we shall find in the same period the germs of 
three other powerful departments of writing. One of these is 
the literature of science ; a second is the literature of law ; a 
third is the literature of religious discussion. 

Early in the twelfth century the impulse given by the Arabs 
to. the advance of science began to be felt ; and a new school of 
scientific thought is represented in its first faint dawn by Athe- 
lard of Bath, born some time in the reign of William the 
Conqueror. He studied at Tours and Laon ; taught at Laon, 
and went eastward ; made his way to Greece and Asia Minor, 
perhaps even to Bagdad ; and, coming home to England in the 
reign of Henry I., on his wa}' home taught the Arabian sciences, 
which he then discussed in a book of u Questions in Nature " 
(" Qusestiones Naturales "). 

In this book Atlielard represented himself, on his return to England, 
hearing from his friends their complaint of "violent princes, vinolent 
chiefs, mercenary judges," and more ills of life. These ills, he said, he 
should cure by forgetting them, and withdrawing his mind to the study 
of nature. His nephew, interested also in the causes of things, asked 
Athelard for an account of his Arabian studies, and the book was his 
answer. He had left his nephew, seven years ago, a youth in his 
class at Laon. It had been agreed then that the uncle should seek 



To A.D. 1350.] ATHELARD OF BATH. 47 

knowledge of the Arabs, and the nephew be taught by the Franks. The 
nephew doubted the advantage of his uncle's course of study. What 
could he show for it ? To give proof of its value, Athelard proceeded 
to results. "And because," he said, " it is the inborn vice of this gen- 
eration to think nothing discovered by the moderns worth receiving ; 
whence it comes, that, if you wish to publish any thing of your own, you 
say, putting it off on another person, It was Somebody who said it, not I 
— so, that I may not go quite unheard, Mr. Somebody is father to all I 
know, not I." He then proposed and discussed sixty-seven questions in 
nature, beginning with the grass, and rising to the stars, the nephew 
solving problems in accordance with the knowledge of the West, the uncle 
according to the knowledge of the East, where the Arabians were then 
bringing a free spirit of inquiry to the mysteries of science. Athelard 
of Bath wrote also on the abacus and the astrolabe, translated an 
Arabic work upon astronomy, and was the first bringer of Euclid into 
England by a translation, which remained the text-book of succeeding 
mathematicians, and was among the works first issued from the printing- 
press. 

This brave and earnest man likewise expressed his love of 
science in a little allegory, "De Eoclem et Diverso " ("On 
the Same and the Different "), published before 1116. 

The taste for allegory was now gathering strength in Europe. It had 
arisen in the early church, especially among the Greek Fathers, with 
ingenious interpretation of the Scriptures. Bede, following this ex- 
ample, showed how, in Solomon's temple, the windows represented holy 
teachers, through whom enters the light of heaven ; and the cedar was 
the incorruptible beauty of the virtues. When the monasteries passed 
from their active work as missionary stations into intellectual strife con- 
cerning orthodoxy of opinions, volleys of subtle interpretation and 
strained parallel were exchanged continually by the combatants. As the 
monasteries became rich, wealth brought them leisure, and temptation of 
the flesh; but still they were centres of intelligence; and as, in Southern 
Europe, along the coasts of the Mediterranean, contact with tuneful, 
rhyming Arabs was awakening a soft strain of love-music, the educated 
men of leisure in the monasteries must also exercise their skill. Love, 
it was said, after the Arabs, is the only noble theme of song. We also, 
said the church-bound, obey poet's law, and sing of love; but, when we 
name a lady, we mean Holy Church, or we mean the Virgin, or we mean 
some virtue. It is earthly love to the ear; but there is always an under- 
lying, spiritual sense. Thus we shall find, in a few generations more, 
the taste for allegory coloring almost the whole texture of European 
literature, and then remaining for a long time dominant. Athelard' s 
little allegory is the first example in our literature of what afterwards 
became one of the commonest of allegoric forms. He represents Phi- 



43 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

losophy and Philocosmia, or love of worldly enjoyment, as having ap- 
peared to him, when he was a student on the banks of the Loire, in the 
form of two women, who disputed for his affections, until he threw him- 
self into the arms of Philosophy, drove away her rival with disgrace, 
and sought the object of his choice with an ardor that carried him in 
search of knowledge to the distant Arabs. 

15. Another writer who did somewhat to build up a literature of 
science in England was Alexander Neckham. Born in 1157, he was 
educated at St. Albans, and early intrusted with the school at Dunstable, 
dependent on the Abbey of St. Albans. In 1180, at the age of twenty- 
three, he was in Paris, distinguished as a teacher. He wrote within 
the next ten years a "Treatise on Science," in ten books of Latin 
elegiac verse, wherein he treated of creation, the elements, water and 
its contents, fire, air, the earth's surface, its interior, plants, animals, 
and the seven arts. He wrote a similar book in prose, besides other 
Latin poems, grammatical and theological treatises, and commentaries 
upon works of Aristotle. Neckham lived on through the reigns of 
Kichard I. and John. In 1213 he became abbot of the Augustines at 
Cirencester, and he died in 1217. 

16. But the great light in science during all those ages, both 
for England and the rest of the world, was Roger Bacon, 
who, born in 1214, was in his cradle in Somersetshire when 
the barons obtained from King John his signature to Magna 
Charta. He belonged to a rich family, sought knowledge from 
childhood, and avoided the strife of the clay. He studied at 
Oxford and Paris, and the death of his father may have placed 
his share of the paternal estate in his hands. He spared no 
cost for instructors and transcribers, books and experiments ; 
mastered not only Latin thoroughly, but also Hebrew and 
Greek, which not more than five men in England then under- 
stood grammatically, although there were more who could 
loosely read and speak those tongues. He was made doctor 
in Paris, and had the degree confirmed in his own University 
of Oxford. Then he withdrew entirely from the civil strife 
that was arising, and joined the house of the Franciscans in 
Oxford, having spent all his time in the world, and two thousand 
pounds of mone3 T , in the search for knowledge. Roger Bacon's 
family committed itself to the king's side in the civil war which 
Henry III.'s greed, his corruption of justice, and violation of 
the defined rights of his subjects, brought upon him. The 
success of the barons ruined Bacon's family, and sent his 



To A.D. 1350.] ROGER BACOK. 49 

mother, brothers, and whole kindred into exile. Meanwhile 
the philosopher, as one of the Oxford Franciscans, had joined 
an order which prided itself in the checks put by it on the 
vanity of learning. But, in spite of their self-denials, the 
Franciscans, at Oxford and elsewhere, included man}' learned 
men, who, b}" the daily habit of their minds, were impelled to 
give to scholarsliip a wholesome practical direction. They were 
already beginning to supply the men who raised the character 
of teaching at the University of Oxford till it rivalled that of 
Paris. Friar Bacon was among the earliest of these teachers : 
so was Friar Bungaj', who lives with him in popular tradition. 
Roger Bacon saw how the clerg}' were entangled in barren 
subtleties of a logic far parted from all natural laws out of 
which it sprang. He believed that the use of all his knowledge, 
if he could but make free use of it, would be to show how 
strength and peace were to be given to the Church. And then 
the Pope, who had been told of his rare acquirements and his 
philosophic mind, bade Roger Bacon, disregarding aiw rule 
of his order to the contrary, write for him what was in his 
mind. Within his mind were the first principles of a true and 
fruitful philosophy. But to commit to parchment all that he 
had been pining to say would cost him sixty pounds in mate- 
rials, transcribers, necessary references, and experiments. He 
was a Franciscan, vowed to povert}', and the Pope had sent no 
money with the command to write. Bacon's exiled mother and 
brothers had spent all they were worth upon their ransoms. 
Poor friends furnished the necessary rnone}', some of them 03' 
pawning goods, upon the understanding that their loans would 
be made known to his Holiness. There was a difficulty between 
the philosopher and his immediate superiors, because the Pope's 
command was private, and only a relief to Bacon's private 
conscience. His immediate rulers had received no orders to 
relax the discipline which deprived Franciscans of the luxury 
of pen and ink. But obstacles were overcome ; and then Roger 
Bacon produced within a } T ear and a half, 1268-69, his " Opus 
Majus " (" Greater Work "), which now forms a large, closely- 
printed folio ; his " Opus Minus " (" Lesser Work ") , which was 
sent after the " Opus Majus " to Pope Clement, to recapitulate 



50 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

its arguments, and strengthen some of its parts ; and his " Opus 
Tertium " (" Third Work "), which followed as a summary and 
introduction to the whole, enriched with further novelt}-, and 
prefaced with a detail of the difficulties against which its 
author had contended, — details necessary to be given, because, 
he said, that he might obey the Pope's command, the friar had 
pawned to poor men the credit of the Holy See. These books, 
produced by Roger Bacon at the close of Henry III.'s reign, 
and when he was himself about fifty-four years old, rejected 
nearly all that was profitless, and fastened upon all that there 
was with life and power of growth in the knowledge of his time. 
They set out with a principle in which Bacon the Friar first 
laid foundations of the philosophy of Bacon the Chancellor of 
later time. He said that there were four grounds of human 
ignorance, — trust in inadequate authority, the force of custom, 
the opinion of the inexperienced crowd, and the hiding of 
one's own ignorance, with the parading of a superficial wisdom. 
Roger Bacon advocated the free, honest questioning of nature ; 
and, where books were requisite authorities, warned men against 
the errors that .arose from reading them in bad translations. 
He would have had all true students endeavor to read the 
original texts of the Bible and of Aristotle. He dwelt on 
the importance of a stud} T of mathematics, adding a particular 
consideration of optics, and ending with the study of nature 
b} r experiment, which, he said, is at the root of all other 
sciences, and a basis of religion. Roger Bacon lived into the 
reign of Edward I., and died, probably, in the year 1292. 

17. Side by side with this development of a true spirit in 
philosophy, the steady endeavor towards right and justice which 
arose out of the character of its people had enabled England 
to maintain the rights of subjects against all wrong-doing of 
their kings. 

In the latter part of the twelfth century Ralph G-lanville 
wrote his Latin treatise ' ' Upon the Laws and Customs of the 
Kingdom of England " (" Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudini- 
bus Regni Anglise " ) , which was completed towards the close of 
the reign of Henry II., and is the first treatise on English law. 
He says that the confusion of our laws made it impossible to 






To A.D. 1350.I HENRY OF BR ACTON. 51 

give a general view of the whole laws and customs of the land ; 
he sought rather to give a practical sketch of forms of proced- 
ure in the king's courts, and of the principles of law most 
frequently arising, discussing only incidentally the first princi- 
ples upon which law is based. 

Progress made in jurisprudence since the days of Henrj- II. 
is illustrated in the reign of Henry III. b} T the appearance of a 
jurist, Henry of Bracton, who wrote a book with the same 
title as Glanville's, — "Upon the Laws and Customs of Eng- 
land." Of Bracton himself it is known only that he wrote his 
treatise in the reign of Henry III., probably between the years 
1256 and 1259; that it proves him to have been a lawyer by 
profession, deeply read in Roman law ; and that he must have 
been the justiciar}' Hemy of Bracton mentioned in judicial 
records of 1246, 1252, 1255, and other 3-ears, to 1267 inclusive. 
He was a judge, therefore, from 1245 to 1267, if not longer. 
There is reason to think he was a clerk in orders before he be- 
came a lawyer. In his treatise he does not, like Glanville, avoid 
dealing with first principles. English law had, during the 
seventy }'ears between Glanville's book and Bracton's, been de- 
veloped into a science, and the time was come for the first scien- 
tific commentary on its rules. Bracton painted accurately, in 
tiie five books into which his work is divided, the state of the 
law in his time, and he digested it into a logical system. The 
king's place in its s} T stem Bracton thus defined: "The king 
must not be subject to an} r man, but to God and the law ; for 
the law makes him king. Let the king, therefore, give to the 
law what the law gives to him, — dominion and power ; for there 
is no king where will, and not law, bears rule." 

18. In the department of religious discussion English litera- 
ture in everj' period has been copious and strong. It is impor- 
tant to observe, that, in the period now under view, the English 
mind was stirred b}' two great religious topics that have often 
since then engaged its passionate attention : first, the seat and 
limit of authority ; and, second, corruption in the visible church. 
Controversy upon the seat and limit of authorit}', which, in its 
successive forms, is the most vital part of English history, and 
has been essential eveiy where to the advance of modern Europe, 



52 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

became active in man}' countries dming the latter half of the 
twelfth century. It became especially active at that time in 
England, as illustrated by the struggle between Henry II. and 
Thomas a Becket. 

As we shall find the course of English literature illustrating through- 
out a steady maintenance of the principle out of which this contest 
arises, let us at once settle the point of view from which it will be here 
regarded. 

]Sfo two men think alike upon all points, and some part of the differ- 
ence is as distinctly natural as that which distinguishes one man from 
another by his outward fomi and face. It is part of the divine plan of 
the world that we should not all have the same opinions. If we observe 
in one man the group of ideas fomhng his principles of thought, we find 
that they have well-marked characters, which are common to him and 
to many others. One might even imagine an arrangement of men by 
their way of thought, as of plants by their way of growth, into primary 
classes, sections, alliances, families, genera, and species. The two 
primary classes of civilized men are (1) those in whom it is the natural 
tendency of the mind to treasure knowledge of the past, and shun 
departure from that which has been affirmed by wise and good men 
throughout many generations, — those, in short, who find rest, and hope 
of unity, in the upholding of authority; and (2) those in whom it is the 
natural tendency of the mind to claim free right of examining and test- 
ing past opinions, who seek the utmost liberty of thought and action, 
holding that the best interests of the future are advanced when every 
man labors for truth in his own way, and holds sincerely by his indi- 
vidual convictions. Look where we may, to parties in the Church, to 
parties in the State, or any chance knot of a dozen men collected at a 
dinner-party, the form of debate invariably shows this natural division 
of men's minds, serving its purpose for the thorough trial of new truth. 
No bold assertion is allowed to pass unquestioned. Whoever states a 
fact must also be prepared to prove it against ready opponents, who pro- 
duce all possible grounds of doubt, and forms of evidence, against it. 
Thus men are trained in the right use of reason: their intellectual 
limbs gather strength by healthy exercise; and wholesome truths come 
out of the ordeal, as the pure grain winnowed from the chaff. Instead 
of wishing that all men were of our minds, we should account it one of 
the first blessings of life that there are men who don't agree with us. 
The currents of the air and sea are not more necessary, and more surely 
a part of the wise ordinance of the Creator, than those great currents of 
thought, which, with all the storms bred of their conflict, maintain 
health in man's intellectual universe. 

When the millions lie in darkness, and are thought for by the few, 
they need the guidance of an absolute authority. As the light grows on 



To A.D. 1350.] NIGEL WIREKER. 53 

them, each becomes more able to help himself. External aids and re- 
strictions become gradually less and less necessary; exercise of authority 
falls within narrower limits ; and exercise of individual discretion takes 
a wider range. This constant re-adjustment of the boundary-line be- 
tween individual right and the restraint of law must needs advance with 
civilization, as keen intellectual debate prepares the way for every 
change. In England such a process has gone on so actively and freely, 
that its political institutions, which have grown, and are growing with 
its growth, are strong also with all its strength. 

In the time of Henry II. the contest between the king and Becket 
represented what was then the chief point to be settled in the argument 
as to the limit of authority. It was a question of supremacy between 
the two great forms of authority to which men were subjected. Was 
the church, representing God on earth, to be, through its chief, the 
Pope, a supreme arbiter in the affairs of men, — a Lord of lords and 
King of kings ? Or was the king alone supreme in every temporal rela- 
tion with his subjects ? Becket devoutly battled for supreme rule of the 
church. Henry maintained the independence of his crown. That battle 
won, the next part of the controversy on the limit of authority would 
concern the relations between king and people. When Henry's cause 
was stained with the crime of Becket's murder, the church had an 
advantage of which it understood the value. All that was done to make 
the shrine of the martyred Becket a place of pilgrimage, and to exalt the 
saint, was exaltation of the name inseparable from the cause of an 
unlimited churcb supremacy. 

19. In the reign of Henry II. lived a noted religious satirist, 
Nigel Wireker, who was precentor in the Benedictine monas- 
tery at Canterbury. He wrote a treatise on the " Corruptions 
of the Church," which he dedicated to William de Longchamp, 
afterwards Bishop of Ely. His minor writings were attacks 
upon self-seeking and hypocrisy among those who made reli- 
gion their profession ; for the movement towards reformation in 
the church was now begun. Wireker 's chief work, "Brunel- 
lus," or " Speculum Stultorum " (" The Mirror of Fools "), is 
a satirical poem in about 3,800 Latin elegiac lines, which has 
for its hero an ass, who goes the round of the monastic orders. 

The name of this hero, Brunellus, a diminutive of Brown, is taken 
from the jargon of the monastic schools, which the author meant to 
satirize. The ass Brunellus found his tail too short, and went to con- 
sult Galen on the subject. The author explained that his " ass is that 
monk, who, not content with his own condition, wants to have his old 
tail pulled off, and try by all means to get a new and longer tail to grow 



54 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

in its place; that is to say, by attaching to himself priories and abbeys." 
Brunellus was unlucky with his medicines, and had part of his tail, short 
as he thought it, bitten off by four great mastiffs. He could not go home 
to his friends in that state. He felt that he had an immense power of 
patient labor. He would go and study at the University of Paris. After 
seven years of hard work there, he could not remember the name of the 
town in which he had been living. But he was" proud of his erudition. 
He did also remember one syllable of the town's name, and had been 
taught that part may stand for the whole. The sketch of Brunellus at 
Paris is a lively satire upon the shortcomings of the schools. Brunellus 
having gone straight through the sciences, it was only left for him to 
perfect himself in religion. He tried all the orders in succession, and 
ended in the resolve to construct for himself out of them a new com- 
posite order of his own. Meeting Galen, Brunellus entered into discus- 
sion with him on the state of the church and of society, until he fell 
into the hand of his old master, and returned to the true duties of his 
life. 

20. Nigel Wireker did not fight unaided in this battle against 
the corruption which had come into the church with wealth and 
idleness. A like battle formed part of the work of the man of 
greatest genius among those who wrote in the time of Henry II., 
— Walter Map, whom we have alreacly studied in connection 
with the satirical and romantic poetry of this period. And the 
fight for church reform was taken up and carried forward in 
graver fashion by Robert G-rosseteste (also called Grost- 
head) , who was born of poor parents at Stradbrook, in Suffolk, 
about the } T ear 1175. He studied perhaps at Paris as well as 
at Oxford, where he graduated in divinity, and became master 
of the schools. Grosseteste was contemporary with the found- 
ers of those orders of friars, the Franciscans and Dominicans, 
who represented in their first institution a strong effort to give 
to the church unit}' of faith and a pure Christian discipline. 
Dominic was five years older, Francis of Assisi seven }*ears 
younger, than Robert Grosseteste, who became in 1224, at the 
request of Agnellus, the provincial minister of the Franciscans 
in England, their first rector at Oxford. He had already been 
Archdeacon of Wilts, was then Archdeacon of Northampton, 
and became afterwards Archdeacon of Leicester. At one time 
he was Rector of St. Margaret's, Leicester. In 1232, after a 
severe illness, Grosseteste, who would no longer be a pluralist, 
gave up all his preferments, except a prebend at Lincoln ; and 






To A.D. 1350.] ROBERT GROSSETESTE. 55 

in 12:3") he was made Bishop of Lincoln, then the largest and 
most populous diocese in the country, and very famous for its 
theological school. It was as Bishop of Lincoln that Grosse- 
teste began the most energetic part of his career as church 
reformer. Strictly interpreting the duties of his office, he de- 
voted himself to the suppression of abuses. Within a year of 
his consecration he had, after a visitation of the monasteries, 
removed seven abbots and four priors. Next }*ear he was, in a 
council held in London, supporting the proposal to deprive plu- 
ralists of all their livings except one. His strictness produced 
outcry. The canons preached against their bishop in his own 
cathedral ; a monk tried to poison him. In 1245 Grosseteste 
obtained the support of the Pope for his visitations ; and in 
124G he obtained another bull from the Pope to prevent scholars 
at Oxford from graduating in arts without examination. When 
his visitations were resumed, his unreserved inquiry into the 
morals of those who undertook the spiritual guidance of his 
diocese produced so much scandal, that appeal was made to the 
king to check it. The king interfered 03- forbidding laymen 
to give evidence in such matters before Grosseteste's officials. 
Grosseteste battled against the greed of monks who seized for 
their monasteries possessions and tithes of the church meant 
for the use of resident priests. But the monks made it worth 
the Pope's while to be deaf to all the bishop's arguments upon 
that head. As he left the Pope, Grosseteste said aloud, so that 
his Holiness might hear, " O money, mone} T ! how much 3011 can 
do! — especially at the court of Rome." In 1252 Grosseteste 
caused a calculation to be made of the income of the foreign 
clergy thrust by the Pope on English maintenance. It was 
seventy thousand marks, — three times the clear revenue of 
the king. In the following year, 1253, the last year of his life, 
Grosseteste made a famous stand against the avarice of Rome, 
b} r refusing to induct one of the Pope's nephews into a canonry 
at Lincoln. He died in the autumn of that year, accusing 
Rome of the disorders brought into the church. He left his 
librar}' to the Franciscans. The mere list of his own writings 
occupies three and twenty closely-printed quarto pages. He 
wrote a book of husbandry in Latin, of which there are also 



56 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

MSS. in French. He wrote sermons, treatises on physical and 
mental philosophy, commentaries on Aristotle, Latin and French 
verse, including a religious allegory of the " Chateau d' Amour." 
He applied also a rare knowledge of Greek and Hebrew to the 
minutest study of the Scriptures. He battled against the cor- 
ruption of the church, not in the narrow spirit of an ascetic. 
Three things, he once told a Dominican, are necessary for tem- 
poral health, — food, sleep, and liveliness. Heartily in accord 
with the movement represented by the poverty of the Francis- 
cans, he said that he liked to see the friars' dresses patched. 
But when one of them, mistaking a particular means for the 
great end that was sought thereby, praised, in a sermon, men- 
dicanc}' as the highest step towards the attainment of all heaven- 
ly things, Grosseteste told him that there was a step yet higher ; 
namely, to support one's self by one's own labor. One inti- 
mate friend of Grosseteste' s was especially struck by his cour- 
age in facing both the King and the Pope to maintain right : 
another, the most famous of his pupils, Roger Bacon, was im- 
pressed most by his marvellous and almost universal knowledge. 
21. Thus we see, that, during the three centuries from the 
Norman conquest to the beginning of Chaucer's career, a veiy 
considerable body of literature was produced by Englishmen in 
languages not English, — chiefly in Latin. We have reserved to 
the last the mention of one book, which fitly closes this branch 
of our subject, — a book which was produced near the end of the 
present period, and which seems to gather into itself the finest 
qualities both of literature and of scholarship pervading that 
entire mass of Anglo-Latin writings. The book to which we 
refer is "• Philobiblon, seu de Amore Librorum et Institutione 
Bibliothecse Tractatus " ("A Treatise on the Love of Books ") . 
Its author, Richard Aungervyle, was born in the year 1281, at 
Bury St. Edmund's, in Suffolk, and has, therefore, usually been 
called, from his birthplace, Richard de Bury. His father was 
a Norman knight, who died in middle life, and left him to the 
care of his maternal uncles, who sent him to continue his studies 
at Oxford. There he distinguished himself so much b} r his ac- 
quirements, that he was appointed tutor to Prince Edward, after- 
wards King Edward III. This laid the foundation of the hearty 



To A.D. 1350.] RICHARD DE BURY. 57 

friendship between Richard de Bury and his royal pupil, which 
brought to the former the great influence and prosperity en- 
joyed by him during his life. On the accession of Edward, his 
tutor was given one office after another until he became lord- 
chancellor ; and in 1333 he was made Bishop of Durham. 
Three years before that, he had been sent in great state as 
ambassador to Pope John XXII. at Avignon, and there met 
Petrarch, who was at that time twent}'-six years old. Petrarch, 
knowing that Richard de Bury was a great scholar, who had 
collected the largest library in England, asked him for some in- 
formation on the subject of the " farthest Thule," which Rich- 
ard said that he thought he could find in one of his books when 
he got home, and promised to send ; but, as Petrarch told one 
of his correspondents, he forgot to send it. He might well 
forget ; for he was very bus}'. Even after he became Bishop 
of Durham, he was employed by the king as his ambassador, 
that he might use his wit in carrying out the peaceful policy that 
he advised. His wealth and influence were ver}' great, and he 
made generous use of them. In politics his voice was on the 
side of peace and good-will. When his desires for peace were 
frustrated, he closed his career as a statesman. In his diocese 
he was a most liberal friend to the poor. As a scholar he was 
the friend of all who sought knowledge, and gave to all true 
students who asked for it, with his hospitality while they were 
studying at Durham, free access to that valuable library which 
it had been the chief pleasure of his life to collect. He had 
used his private fortune and his influence in Church and State 
as a collector of books, applying to them the counsel of Solomon, 
" Buy wisdom, and sell it not." Travelling friars searched for 
him among the book-chests of foreign monasteries. Suitors in 
chancery knew that the gift of a rare volume would induce the 
chancellor, not to pervert justice, but to expedite the hearing of 
their suits. The books, collected with enthusiasm, were not 
treasured as a miser's hoard. When he withdrew from partici- 
pation in the too warlike x^olicy of Edward III., Richard de 
Bury, confining himself to the duties of his diocese, lived re- 
tired among his beloved parchments, still drawing to himself as 
chaplains and companions the most learned English scholars of 



58 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1066 

his time. To be his chaplain, and by scholarship to win the 
household affection of a man so influential with the king, was 
a step to promotion sure enough to satisfy ambitious minds ; 
while life with Richard Aungervyle housed the scholar among 
books, and gave him hourly access to the best library in Eng- 
land. 

He died at his palace of Auckland in 1345 ; and it was only 
a little while before his death that he had finished his delightful 
book about books, which will keep his name ahVe as long as 
books last. It consists of a prologue and twenty chapters. In 
the prologue he greets his readers, and expresses s}'mpathy for 
good scholars whose stud}' poverty impedes ; and for their 
sakes, as well as his own, he has long been, he says, an ardent 
collector of books. The first chapter opens the subject by 
commanding wisdom, and books as the abode of wisdom. 
' ' The glory of the world would perish in oblivion if God had 
not provided mortals with the remedies of books. Towers 
crumble to the earth ; but he whose book lives cannot die. And 
it is to be considered, lastly, what convenience of teaching is in 
books, how easily, how secretly, how safely, in books we bear, 
without shame, the poverty of human ignorance. These are 
masters who instruct us without rod and cane, without words 
and wrath, and for no clothes or monej'. If 3-011 approach 
them, they are not asleep ; if 3*011 question them, they are not 
secret ; if 3-011 go astra3 T , they do not grumble at 3-011 ; the3 T 
know not how to laugh if 3-ou are ignorant. O books ! 3-e only 
are liberal and free, who pay tribute to all who ask it, and en- 
franchise all who serve 3-011 faithfully." 

Thus he proceeds from chapter to chapter, writing in a viva- 
cious style, and enforcing, with a contagious enthusiasm, the 
right spirit of stud3 T and the right care of books. It is notice- 
able, that, orthodox bishop as he was, no book of the time spoke 
more severely than his of the degradation of the clerg3', of the 
sensuality and ignorance of monks and friars. The main object 
of Richard de Buiy's book was practical. He was within a 
year of his death when he wrote it ; and he desired not only to 
justify his life-long enthusiasm as a book-collector, but to make 
the treasures which he had held in his lifetime as a trust for the 



To A.D. 1350.] RICHARD BE BURY. 59 

benefit of all good scholarship in England useful after his death 
forever. " Philobiblon " ended, therefore, with a plan for the be- 
quest of his books to Oxford, on conditions that were to secure 
their perpetual usefulness, not merely to the particular hall 
which he proposed to endow in association with his library, but 
to the whole university. He did, accordingly, endow a hall, 
which the monks of Durham had begun to build in the north 
suburbs of Oxford, and did leave to it his famous library. 
Aungervyle's library remained at Durham College, for the use 
of the university, until that college was dissolved in the time of 
He my VIII. Some of the books then went to Duke Hum- 
phrey's library, and some to Balliol College. Some went to Dr. 
George Owen, the physician of Edward VI. 



CHAPTER II. 

ENGLISH WRITINGS OF THE TRANSITIONAL 
PERIOD. 

1. State of English Literature in this Period. — 2. Layamon. — 3. Orm. — 4. Nich- 
olas of Guildford; Devotional and Moral Writings; Romances; Ancren 
Riwle. — 5. Robert of Gloucester and his Contemporaries. — 6. Robert of 
Rrunne. — 7. Laurence Minot. — S. Richard Rolle. — 9. Dan Michel. — 10. 
Ralph Higden and English Miracle-Plays. — 11. The Chester Plays. — 12. The 
Shepherds' Play. — 13. The Modern Drama. 

1. TVe must now turn from the Latin and French writings 
produced by Englishmen during the three centuries between the 
Conquest and Chaucer, and must give our attention to whatever 
writings were produced during the same period in the English 
language. 

For the first hundred and forty years of this period almost 
nothing was written in the language of the conquered race ; 
and we ma}' think of English literature for all those hundred 
and fort}' years as in a state of abeyance, waiting for the time 
when the people who were inclined to write in the English lan- 
guage should rally from the depression caused by the Norman 
Conquest. In the reign of King John, which began in 1199, 
books in the English language once more made their appear- 
ance ; and their number steadily increased from that time on- 
ward. Nevertheless, during this entire period, English was not 
the fashionable or dominant language in England ; and the 
highest and best thought of England uttered itself in speech 
that was alien to England. 

2. Perhaps the earliest book representing the revival of a 
desire for literary utterance in English is a long and notable 
poem called "Brut." Its- author was Layamon, a priest of 
the church at Ernie}', in Worcestershire. Living in the days 
when Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Chronicle" and Wace's French 



A.D. 1066.] LAYAMOX. 61 

metrical version of it were new books in high fame among the 
educated and the courtly, " it came to him in mind, and in his 
chief thought," that he would tell the famous stoiy to his coun- 
trymen in English verse. He made a long journey in search of 
copies of the books on which he was to found his poem ; and 
when he had come home again, as he sa3's, "Layamon laid 
down those books, and turned the leaves ; he beheld them lov- 
ingly. Ma}' the Lord be merciful to him!" Then, blending 
literature with his parish duties, the good priest began his work. 
Priest in a rural district, he was among those who spoke the 
language of the country with the least mixture of Norman 
French, and he developed Wace's " Brut " into a completely 
English poem, with so man}' additions from his own fancy, or 
his own knowledge of West -country tradition, that, while 
Wace's " Brut " is a poem of 15,300 lines, Layamon's " Brut " 
is a poem of 32,250 lines. Layamon's verse is the old First 
English unrhymed measure, with alliteration, less regular in its 
structure than in First English times, and with an occasional 
slip into rhyme. Battles are described as in First English 
poems. Here, as in First English poetry, there are few similes, 
and those which occur are simply derived from natural objects. 
There is the same use of a descriptive s3*noii3'me for man or 
warrior. There is the old depth of earnestness that rather gains 
than loses dignity by the simplicity of its expression. From 
internal evidence it appears that the poem was completed about 
the year 1205. It comes down to us in two thirteenth-century 
MSS., one written a generation later than the other, and there 
are many variations of their text ; but the English is so distinctly 
that of the people in a rural district, that, in the earlier MS., the 
whole poem contains less than fifty words derived from the 
Norman, and some of these might have come direct from Latin. 
In the second MS. about twent} T of those words do not occur; 
but forty others are used. Thus the two MSS., in their 56,800 
lines, do not contain more than ninetj- words of Norman origin. 
In its grammatical structure Layamon's English begins for us 
the illustration of the gradual loss of inflections, and other 
changes, during the transition of the language from First Eng- 
lish to its present form. It has been called Semi-Saxon ; it is 



62 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

better called Transitional English of Worcestershire in the be- 
ginning of the thirteenth cent my. 

3. A writer named Ormin, or Orm, began also, in the reign 
of King John, another English poem of considerable extent, 
called, from his own name, " The Ormulum." He tells of him- 
self, in the dedication of his book, that he was a regular canon 
of the order of St. Augustine, and that he wrote in English, at 
the request of brother Walter (also an Augustinian canon), 
for the spiritual improvement of his countrymen. The plan of 
his book is to give to the English people, in their own tongue, 
and in an attractive form, the spiritual import of the church 
services throughout the 3 T ear. He gave first a metrical para- 
phrase of the portion of the Gospel assigned to each da}', and 
added to each portion of it a metrical horniTy, in which it was 
expounded doctrinally and practically, with frequent borrowing 
from the writings of iElfric, and some borrowing from Bede. 
The metre is in alternate verses of eight and seven syllables, in 
imitation of a Latin rhythm ; or in lines of fifteen sj'llables, 
with a metrical point at the end of the eighth ; thus, — 

" This boc iss nemmned Ormulum, 
Forthi that Orm itt wrohhte." 

Of the homilies provided for nearby the whole of the yearly 
service nothing remains bej'ond the thirty-second, and there 
remains no allusion that points to the time when the work was 
written. Its language, however, places it with the earliest ex- 
amples of Transitional English, and it belongs, no doubt, to the 
reign of John, or to the first } T ears of the reign of Henry III. 
It seems to be the Transitional English of a north-eastern county : 
and the author had a peculiar device of spelling, on the adher- 
ence to which by cop}dsts he laid great stress. Its purpose 
evidently was to guide any half-Normanized town-priest in the 
right pronunciation of the English when he read these verses 
aloud for the pleasure and good of the people. After every 
short vowel, and only then, Orm doubled the consonant. 

4. In the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), which we have now reached, 
the production of books in the English language became more and more 
common. 



To A.D. 1350.] THOMAS OF ERCELDOUNE. 63 

There is a bright English poem, called "The Owl and the Night- 
ingale," which tells how those birds advanced each against the other 
his several claims to admiration and the demerits of his antagonist; and 
how they called upon the author, Nicholas of Guildford, to be judge 
between them. Master Nicholas lets us know, that, from a gay youth in 
the world, he had passed into the church, where his merits had been 
neglected, and that he was living at Portesham in Dorsetshire. In this 
poem we have the rhyming eight-syllabled measure of many a French 
romance; but it is so distinctly English of a rural district, that its 1,792 
lines contain only about twenty words which are distinctly Norman in 
their origin. 

To about the year 1250 belongs an English poem kindred in spirit to 
the " Ormulum," and, indeed, illustrative of the same feature in Eng- 
lish character which was marked at the outset of our literature by Caed- 
raon's "Paraphrase." This is a version of the Scripture narrative of 
Genesis and Exodus. Like " The Owl and the Nightingale," it illus- 
trates the adoption of rhyme into our native poetry by use of the octo- 
syllabic rhyming verse common in many French romances. The poem 
of " Genesis and Exodus " is by an unknown author. In its 4,162 lines 
there are only about fifty words of Norman origin. The writer begins 
by saying that men ought to love those who enable the unlearned to 
love and serve the God who gives love and rest of the soul to all Chris- 
tians, and that Christian men should be glad as birds are of the dawn to 
have the story of salvation turned out of Latin into their own native 
speech. 

The same spirit among the people is represented, from the date of 
Layamon onward, by Homilies, Metrical Creeds, Paternosters, Gaudia, 
or Joys of the Virgin, and short devotional or moral poems, of which 
MSS. remain. There is also a Bestiary, in English apparently of the 
same date; and in its 802 lines, except one or two Latin names of ani- 
mals, which had already been adopted m First English, there are not 
more than eight words of Romance origin. 

During the reign of Henry III. we meet the earliest translations into 
English verse of French popular romances. The most notable of these 
were " King Horn" and " The Romance of Alexander." 

"King Horn" belongs to an Anglo-Danish cycle of romance, from 
which the Norman trouveres drew material, and includes such tales as 
" Havelok the Dane," " Guy of Warwick and Colbrond the Dane." 

"Alexander" was a famous subject of romance poetry, and re- 
appears, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteen centuries, in Greek, 
Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and Scandinavian. It became the basis 
of many French and English poems likewise. 

We must observe that in the reign of Henry III. appeared the earliest 
Scottish poet, Thomas of Erceldoune, who produced an English ver- 
sion of "Sir Tristrem," and was in repute in his own day, not only as 
a poet, but as a prophet also. 



64 MANUAL OF. ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

Another of the English productions of this time, but one which has 
greater interest to students of language than to students of literature, is 
the " Ancren Riwle " (" Rule of the Anchoresses "), which seems to have 
been written by a Bishop Poor, who died in 1237. It was intended for 
the guidance of a small household of women withdrawn from the world 
for service of God at Tarrant Keyn stone in Dorsetshire. 

5. Passing from the reign of Henry III. to that of Edward I. 
(1272-1307), we find our first example of an English chronicler 
in the period of Transitional English. This was Robert of 
Gloucester, a monk of the abbey 111 that town, who produced 
a rhymed " Chronicle of England," from the siege of Troy to 
the death of Hemy III. in 1272. It was in long lines of seven 
accents, and occasionally six, and was the first complete his- 
tory of his country, from the earliest times to his own da} T , 
written in popular rlrymes b}' an Englishman. The language 
is very free from Norman admixture, and represents West Mid- 
land Transitional English of the end of the thirteenth centuiy. 
Eobert of Gloucester wrote also rhymed " Lives and Legends 
of the English Saints." 

Among other .books written in English during the reign of Edward I. 
was the English version of " The Lay of Havelok the Dane," which was 
made about the year 12S0, and is one of the brightest and most interest- 
ing examples of the English of that time. To nearly the same date 
belongs "A Fragment on Popular Science," which colors with religious 
thought an attempt to diffuse knowledge of some facts in astronomy, 
meteorology, physical geography, and physiology. "A Metrical Version 
of the Psalms" into English was another of the productions of this 
time; it is known as "The Northumbrian Psalter." Luxury of the 
monks was attacked with satire in an English poem of " The Land of 
Cockaygne," named from coquina, a kitchen (a form of satire current 
in many parts of Europe), which told of a region free from trouble, 
where the rivers ran with oil, milk, wine, and honey; wherein the white 
and gray monks had an abbey of which the walls were built of pasties, 
which was paved with cakes, and had puddings for pinnacles. Geese 
there flew about roasted, crying, "Geese, all hot!" and the monks — 
as the song went on it did not spare them. To the close of the reign 
of Edward I. belongs also a set of moralized proverbs, called "The 
Proverbs of Hendyng," in a Southern English dialect. 

6. Passing to the reign of Edward II. (1307-1327), we find 
a time of great literary barrenness, the most notable English 
writer being Robert of Brunne. He wrote in the previous 



To A.D. 1350.] LAURENCE MIXOT. 65 

reign his first work, " Handlynge Synne," a free, amplified 
translation into English verse of a French poem, " Manuel des 
Feches," written Iry an Englishman, William of Waddington. 
Between 1327 and 1338 Robert of Brunne made a popular 
translation into English verse of the French rhyming " Chroni- 
cle " of Peter Langtoft. It should be added, that, throughout 
the fourteenth century, there was a continual reproduction in 
English verse of the most famous among the French, metrical 
romances. 

7. The great King Edward III. came to the throne in 1327 ; 
and in the year 1328, according to the usual chronology, Geof- 
frey Chaucer was born. But the great era of literary pros- 
perity, with which the name of Chaucer is connected, cannot 
be said to begin before the middle of the fourteenth century. 
During the first half of the reign of Edward III., that is, 
during the boyhood of Chaucer, the two most noted English 
writers were North-of-England men, — Laurence Minot and 
Richard Rolle of Hampole. 

Laurence Minot was a poet, who, in Northern English, cele- 
brated victories of Edward III. over the Scots and the French, 
from the battle of Halidon Hill, in J11I3*, 1333, to the capture 
of Guisnes Castle, in Januaiy, 1352. His war-songs were 
linked together by connecting verses. When he had celebrated 
the defeat of the Scots at Halidon Hill, which caused the sur- 
render of Berwick, he exulted in his second song over the 
avenging of Bannockburn ; then celebrated the king's expedi- 
tion to Brabant in 1338 ; proceeded to the first invasion of 
France, the sea-fight of Sluys or of the Swyne, the siege of 
Tournay, a song of triumph for the great battle of Crecy in 
1346, songs of the siege of Calais, and of the battle of Neville's 
Cross (October, 1346) , in which David, King of the Scots, was 
taken prisoner ; then followed his celebrations of victory at 
sea over the Spaniards in 1350, and, lastly, of the taking of 
Guisnes Castle in 1352, when Chaucer was twenty-four years 
old. Probably Minot died soon afterwards, as he did not sing 
of the memorable events of the next following years. He was 
our first national song-writer, and used with ease a variety of 
rhyming measures, while he retained something of the old habit 
of alliteration. 



66 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. io65 

8. Richard Rolle, known also as the Hermit of Hampole, 
was born, about the year 1290, at Thornton in Yorkshire. He 
was sent to school, and from school to Oxford, by Thomas 
Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made great progress in 
theological studies. At the age of nineteen, mindful of the 
uncertainty of life, and fearing the temptation to sin, he re- 
turned home, and one day told a beloved sister that he had a 
mighty desire towards two of her gowns, — one white, the other 
gray. Would she bring them to him the next day in a neigh- 
boring wood, and bring with them a hood her father used in 
rainy weather? When she did so, he took these garments, and 
clothed himself with them ; then, looking as much like a hermit 
as he could, he ran away ; while his sister cried, " My brother 
is mad!" He went then, so dressed, on the vigil of the 
Assumption, into a church, and placed himself where the wife 
of a Sir John de Dalton used to pra} T . When Lad}' de Dalton 
came with her servants, she would not allow them to disturb 
the pious young man at his prayers. Her sons, who had studied 
at Oxford, told her who he was. Next da} T he assumed, un- 
bidden, the dress of an assistant, and joined in the singing of 
the service ; after which, having obtained the benediction of 
the priest, he mounted the pulpit, and preached such a sermon 
that many wept over it, and said they had never heard the like 
before. After mass, Sir John de Dalton invited him to dinner ; 
but he went, because of humilit}', into a poor old house at the 
gate of the manor, till he was urged by the knight's own sons 
to the dinner-table. During dinner he maintained a profound 
silence. But after dinner, Sir John, having talked with him 
privately, was satisfied . qf his sanit}' ; he therefore furnished 
the enthusiast with such hermit's dress as he wished for, gave 
him a cell to live in, and provided for his daily sustenance. 
The Hermit of Hampole, thus set up in his chosen vocation, 
became, while Minot was singing the victories of Edward III., 
the busiest religious writer of his day, and continued so till 
1349, when he died, and was buried in the Cistercian nunnery 
of Hampole, about four miles from Doncas'ter, near which he 
had set up his hermit's cell, and which, after his death, derived 
great profit from his reputation as a saint. He wrote many 



To A. D. I350-] MIRACLE-PLAYS. 67 

religious treatises in Latin and in English, and he turned the 
Psalms of David into English verse. He also versified part of 
the Book of Job, and produced a Northern English poem in 
seven books, and almost ten thousand lines, called " The Pricke 
of Conscience" ("Stimulus Conscientiae "). Its seven books 
treat, 1. Of the Beginning of Man's Life ; 2. Of the Unstable- 
ness of this World ; 3. Of Death, and why Death is to be 
Dreaded; 4. Of Purgatory; 5. Of Doomsday; 6. Of the Pains 
of Hell ; 7. Of the Joys of Heaven. The poem represents 
in the mind of an honest and religious monk that body of 
mediaeval doctrine against which, in some of its parts, — and 
especially its claim for the Pope, or his delegates, of pow r er to 
trade in release from the pains of purgatory, — the most vigor- 
ous protest of the English mind was already arising. 

9. To the year 1340, which is about the date of Hampole's " Pricke 
of Conscience," belongs a prose translation, by Dan Michel of North- 
gate, into Kentish dialect, of a French treatise, " Le Somme des Vices 
et des Vertus," written in 1279 by Frere Lorens (Lanrentius Gallns) 
for Philip III. of France. The English translation is entitled "The 
Ayenbite " (Again-bite, Remorse) "of Inwit" (Conscience). It dis- 
cusses the Ten Commandments, the creed, the seven deadly sins, how to 
learn to die, knowledge of good and evil, wit and clergy, the five senses, 
the seven petitions of the Paternoster, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, 
and other such subjects, with more doctrine and less anecdote than in 
the "Manuel des Peches," or " Handlynge Synne," which was a work 
of like intention. 

10. We have already noted the introduction of miracle-plays 
into England ; but the}' were written in Latin. We have now 
to note several steps in the development of this kind of enter- 
tainment ; the first of which is, that, probabl}- during the first 
half of the fourteenth century, miracle-plays began to be written 
in English. Although not beyond doubt, it is very likely that 
the first acting of miracle-plays in English was at Chester, 
about the j^ear 1328, and that the author of them was a Bene- 
dictine monk, named Ralph Higden, who, in his later years, 
wrote the famous Latin chronicle called " Polychronicon." 

For nearly two hundred years previous to 1328, miracle-plays had been 
growing in popularity in England. Even in the twelfth century the 
acting of these plays began to be outside of the church, instead of 



68 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. io65 

inside. This must soon have become necessary, if it were only for ac- 
commodation of the increasing number of spectators. For the acting of 
those plays of which a MS. was found at Tours, scaffolding was built 
over the steps of the church, and the audience occupied the square in 
front. Out of the heaven of the church, Figura (God) passed to 
Adam in paradise upon a stage level with the highest steps of the 
church-door. From that paradise Adam and Eve were driven down 
a few steps to the lower stage that represented earth. Below this, 
nearest to the spectators, was hell, an enclosed place, in which cries 
were made, chains were rattled, and out of which smoke came; out of 
which, also, men and boys dressed as devils came by a door opening into 
a free space between the scaffolding and the semicircle of the front row 
of spectators. They were also directed now and then to go among the 
people, and passed round by them, sometimes to one of the upper plat- 
forms. The original connection of these plays with the church service 
was represented by the hymns of choristers. 

The next step in the development of the miracle-play was hastened 
by the complaint that the crowds who came to witness the performance, 
on an outside scaffolding attached to the church, trampled the graves 
in the churchyards. Decrees were made to prevent this desecration of 
the graves ; and the advance, probably, was rapid to the setting up of 
detached scaffolding for the performance of the plays — still by the 
clergy, choristers, and parish clerks — upon unconsecrated ground. 

In London the parish clerks had formed themselves into a harmonic 
guild, chartered by Henry III. in 1233 ; and their music was sought at 
the funerals and entertainments of the great. As miracle-plays in- 
creased in popularity, the parish clerks occupied themselves much with 
the acting of them. Chaucer's jolly Absalom, of whom we are told 
that, 

" Sometimes to shew his lightness and maistrie, 
He playeth Herod on a scaffold high," 

was a parish clerk. 

The strongest impulse to a regular participation of the laity in the 
production of these plays seems to have been given by the church, when, 
in 1264, Pope Urban IV. founded, and in 1311 Clement V. firmly estab- 
lished, the festival of Corpus Christi in honor of the consecrated Host. 
This was the one festival of the church wherein laity and clergy walked 
together. The guilds of a town contributed their pictures, images, and 
living representatives of Scripture characters, to the procession, and the 
day was one of common festival. From the parade of persons dressed 
to represent the Scripture characters, it was an easy step to their use in 
the dramatic presentation of a sacred story. Early in the fourteenth 
century one author declared it to be sin in the clergy to assist at any 
other plays than those which belonged to the liturgy, and were acted 
within the church at Easter and Christmas. This author especially con- 
demned participation by the clergy in plays acted in churchyards, streets, 



To A.D. 1350.] MIRACLE-PLAYS. 69 

or green places. In 1378, when Chaucer was fifty years old, the chor- 
isters of St. Paul's Cathedral petitioned Richard II. to prohibit the act- 
ing of the history of the Old Testament, to the great prejudice of the 
clergy of the church, who had spent considerable sums for a public 
representation of Old-Testament plays at the ensuing Christmas. 

In the hands of the English guilds — which stood for the rising middle 
classes of the people — miracle-plays received a development peculiar to 
this country. Instead of short sequences of three or four plays, com- 
plete sets were produced, and they told what were held to be the essen- 
tial parts of the Scripture story from the creation of man to the day of 
judgment. The number in each set may have corresponded to the 
number of guilds in the town for which it was originally written. Each 
guild was intrusted permanently with the due mounting and acting of 
one play in the set. Thus, at Chester, the tanners played "The Fall 
of Lucifer; " the drapers played " The Creation and Fall, and the Death 
of Abel;" "The Story of Noah's Flood" was played by the water 
leaders and the drawers of Dee. Among the possessions of each guild 
were the properties for its miracle-play, carefully to be kept in repair, 
and renewed when necessary. Actors rehearsed carefully, and were 
paid according to the length of their parts. They wore masks, or had 
their faces painted in accordance with the characters they undertook. 
The player of the devil wore wings and a closely-fitting leather dress, 
trimmed with feathers and hair, and ending in claws over the hands 
and feet. All the other actors wore gloves, or had sleeves continued 
into hands. The souls of the saved in the day of judgment wore white 
leather; the others, whose faces were blacked, wore a linen dress sug- 
gestive of fire, with black, yellow, and red. Thus we have, among the 
miscellaneous items in old books of the Coventry guilds, a charge for 
souls' coats, one for a link to set the world on fire, and "paid to Crowe, 
for making of three worlds, three shillings." The stage furniture was 
as handsome in thrones and other properties as each company could 
make it. They gilded what they could. Hell mouth, a monstrous head 
of a whale (its old emblem), was painted on linen with open jaws, — some- 
times jaws that opened- and shut, two men working them, — and a fire 
lighted where it would give the appearance of a breath of flames. By 
this way the fiends came up and down. 

The acting of one of these great sequences of plays usually took three 
days, but was not limited to three. In 1409, in the reign of Henry TV., 
the parish clerks played at Skinner's Well in Islington, for eight days, 
"Matter from the Creation of the World." In England the taste for 
miracle-plays was blended with the old desire to diffuse, as far as possi- 
ble, a knowledge of religious truth; and therefore the sets of miracle- 
plays, as acted by the town guilds, placed in the streets, as completely 
as might be, a living picture-Bible before the eyes of all the people. 
Such sequences of plays were acted in London, Dublin, York, New- 
castle, Lancaster, Preston, Kendal, Wakefield, Chester, Coventry, and 



70 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1066 

elsewhere. The set used in one town might be adopted by another. 
Many sets must have been lost ; but three remain to show how thorough- 
ly the English people sought to use the miracle-play for the advancement 
of right knowledge. These three are known as the " Chester," "Wake- 
field," and "Coventry" plays. 

11. The Chester Plays were a series of twenty-four, written, as we 
have seen, by a monk of St. Werburgh's in Chester, probably Kalph 
Higden, and first acted in 1327 or 1328. 

The spectator who had taken his place betimes — by six o'clock in the 
morning — at a window, or upon a scaffolding, to see the miracle-plays, 
would have first the great decorated stage upon six wheels, which was 
to present the creation, rolled before him. He would receive from that 
such living impression as it was meant to convey; and, when it rolled 
away to begin the series at some other part of the town before another 
concourse of spectators, the next pageant would follow to present to him 
the story of the death of Abel. That would pass, and then would come 
a lively presentment of the story of the flood. Sometimes more than 
one stage was necessary to the acting of a play. The Old-Testament 
series would be founded on those parts of Scripture which told of the 
relations between God and man, and pointed to the Saviour. The New- 
Testament series would represent the life of Christ, still showing what 
the church taught to be man's relation to the world to come, and clos- 
ing with the day of judgment. The acting was not confined to the 
stages, but in some, places blended with the real life of the town. The 
magi rode in through the streets, sought Herod on his throne, and ad- 
dressed him from their horses ; then rode on and found the infant Christ. 
At another time a procession travelled through the streets, leading the 
Lord before the judgment-seat of Pilate. Every thing that was a part of 
Bible story was presented and received with deep religious feeling. The 
coarseness of coarse men — slayers of the innocents, tormentors, and ex- 
ecutioners — was realized in a way, that, whatever we may now think of 
it, had no comic effect upon spectators. If in France the manner of 
acting, which brought those who performed devils' parts into too con- 
stant and familiar relations with the audience, deprived them of terror, 
it was not so in England. Our evil spirits came only when there was fit 
occasion, — as tempters, as bringers of evil dreams, as the possessors of 
lost souls. But, since the strain of deep and serious attention for three 
long successive days could not be borne by any human audience, places 
of relaxation and laughter were provided, always from material that lay 
outside the Bible story. Thus Cain might have a comic man; Noah's 
obstinate wife was an accepted comic character; and between the Old- 
Testament and New-Testament sections of the series there was a dis- 
tinctly comic interlude, — "The Shepherds' Play." 

12. The Shepherds' Play perhaps arose out of a custom, which cer- 
tainly existed in the Netherlands, of blending the performance of a great 
mystery in the church with the daily life of the people in the world out- 



To A . D. 1350.] MIR A CLE-PLA YS. 7 1 

side. The first notion of " The Shepherds' Play " was a homely realiza- 
tion of the record that "there were in the same country shepherds abid- 
ing in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night." Simple 
shepherds were represented first, talking together, and their talk was 
sometimes of the hardships of the poor, of wrongs to be righted; then 
came one who was especially the comic shepherd, and jesting began, with 
wrestling, or some other rough country sport; after that, each would 
bring out his supper. They were shepherds of the same country with 
the spectators of the play. In " The Chester Play " they spoke of eating- 
meat with Lancashire bannocks, and of drinking Alton ale. Jest having 
been made over the rude feast, there floated through the air, from con- 
cealed choristers, the song of the angels. At first the shepherds were 
still in their jesting mood, and mimicked the singing; then they became 
filled with religious awe, went with their rustic gifts to the stable in 
which the infant lay, and, after they had made their offerings, rose up 
exalted into saints. In the Wakefield series there are two Shepherds' 
Plays; so that the actors might take either. In one of them the comic 
shepherd is a sheep-stealer; and an incident which must have excited 
roars of laughter from a rough and hearty Yorkshire audience is so clev- 
erly dramatized, that, apart from the religious close which can be com- 
pletely separated from it, this Wakefield Shepherds' Play may justly be 
accounted the first English farce. 

13. Nevertheless, as we shall find, the origin of the modern 
drama must not be traced to the miracle-play. There is no 
more than a distant cousinship between them. The miracle- 
plays, as thus adopted by the English people, remained part 
of the national life of England, not only throughout Chaucer's 
lifetime, but long afterwards. In Chaucer's time, even the 
Cornishmen had such plays written for them in the old C3~mric 
of Cornwall ; and miracle-plays were still acted at Chester as 
late as the year 1577, at Coventiy as late as 1580, when Shake- 
speare was sixteen years old, and the true drama was rising 
from another source. 



Part III. 
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH 

1350-1550. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

SECQND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH 
CENTURY. 



POETS. 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 
John Gower. 
William Langland. 



John Barbour. 
Author of Piers Plough- 
man's Crede. 



PROSE -WRITERS. 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 
Sir John Mandeville. 
John Wiclif . 



John Trevisa. 
Ralph Strode. 



CHAPTER I. 

SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY: 
CHAUCER. 

1. Chaucer's English. — 2. Chaucer's Parentage and Birth -Year. — 3. His Education. 
— 4. His Training for Poetry. — 5. His Translations of " Le Roman dela Rose" 
and Boethius. — 6. "The Court of Love." — 7. Chaucer's Stanza. — S. "The 
Assembly of Foules." — 9. "Complaint of the Black Knight." — 10. Chaucer's 
Military Career. — 11. His "Dream." — 12. "Book of the Duchess." — 13. His 
Political Life. — 11. Second Period of his Literary Life ; " Troilus and Cres- 
sida." — 15. "House of Fame." — 16. "Legend of Good Women." — 17. His 
Further Political Life — 18. "The Flower and the Leaf." — 19. "The Cuckoo 
and the Nightingale." — 20. His Political Life continued; "The Astrolabe." — 
21. His Last Years. — 22. "Canterbury Tales." — 23. His so-called Spurious 
Writings. 

1. Our writers before Chaucer were men speaking the mind 
of England, either in Latin, the tongue of the learned ; or 
in French, the tongue of the court and the castle ; or in Eng- 
lish, the tongue of the people. But the English the}' used 
differed much, both in vocabulaiy and in grammatical structure, 
from the English of to-day. With Chaucer, however, the 
English language had reached a fulness of development which 
enables it to speak to us all }'et with clearness and a living 
warmth. 

2. Geoffrey Chaucer was the son of Richard Chaucer, a 
wine-dealer of London, and was born in that city, perhaps in 
the }*ear 1328, perhaps not until the year 1340. 

The first of these dates has heen, until lately, the accepted one, and it 
is not yet by any means abandoned. The argument in its favor rests 
chiefly on the fact that 1328 is the date given in the inscription on Chau- 
cer's monument in Westminster Abbey. This monument, an altar-tomb 
under a Gothic canopy, was not erected until the year 1556, when 
Nicholas Brigham, a small poet who reverenced the genius of Chaucer, 
built it at his own expense. But we know from Caxton that there was 
an earlier inscription on a table hanging on a pillar near the poet's burial- 
place; and Brigham can hardly have done otherwise than repeat on his 
new tomb the old record, — that Chaucer died on the 25th of October, 

75 



76 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

1400, and that his age was then seventy-two. This date is in harmony 
with what we know of Chaucer's life and writings. 

The argument against the former date, and in favor of the latter, rests 
chiefly on the fact, that, in a certain famous suit, Chaucer served as a 
witness on the 12th of October, 1386, and that, in the official record of 
his evidence, he is described as " Geffray Chaucere, Esquier, del age de 
xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans " (aged forty and more, and having 
borne arms for twenty-seven years). Here it will be observed that upon 
the point essential to the cause, namely, the length of time during which 
he had borne arms, the record is exact; for it was in 1359 that he began 
to bear arms. If, however, he was born in 1328, he was, at the time of 
giving his testimony, fifty-eight years old ; and to many this seems too 
advanced an age to be fairly descpibe4. by the phrase, " forty years and 
more; " and accordingly, to such, 1340 seems the very earliest date that 
can be fixed for his birth. On the other hand, it is to be said that 
Chaucer probably was not asked his age, since it was not at all material 
to the case, and since, if he had been asked, the answer would have been 
more precise. The reporter perhaps glanced at the witness, and set down 
forage " forty and more," before putting the more material question. 
Upon the age of a man in middle life the estimates differ widely, accord- 
ing to the sense and eyesight of those who make them, and as men differ 
widely in the period at which they begin to show signs of decay. Chaucer 
was healthy, genial, and cheerful. It may well have been enough for a 
rough estimate of h'is age to set down that he was on the wrong side of 
forty, — " forty and more." References made to his old age in Chaucer's 
later life forbid us to be misled by the bad guess of an unknown reporter. 

3. Chaucer's writings show him to have been a student to the 
last ; we cannot therefore ascribe all his knowledge to the edu- 
cation he had as a youth. But his early writings show a range 
of culture that could have come only of a liberal education. 
There is no direct evidence that he studied at Oxford or Cam- 
bridge. If he went to either university, probably it was to 
Cambridge; for in his "Court of Love" he makes his Phi- 
logenet describe himself as " of Cambridge, clerk ; " and in the 
opening of his Reeve's tale he alludes familiarly to the brook, 
mill, and bridge, which were " at Trompington, not far fro 
Cantebrigge." But there are no such familiar references to 
Oxford in his verse, though it must not be forgotten that the 
poor scholar sketched with sympathetic touches in the prologue 
to the " Canterbury Tales " was a clerk of Oxenfordc. 

4. Nothing trustworthy is known of Chaucer's occupation 
during the first years of his manhood. He was a poet, we know ; 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 77 

and perhaps, while training himself for that high service, he may 
have earned money by assisting in the business of the family. 
At any rate, there seems no doubt that his method of training 
himself for poetry consisted of study of the French literature, 
then most in demand, and of practice in translation. This, then, 
we ma}' regard as the first period in Chaucer's literary career, — 
that of literary apprenticeship, during which his own work was 
largely imitative, and the models for his work were French. 

5. It was in this time of his life that he turned into English 
verse the famous French poem called " Le Roman de la Rose," 
which in the original was begun early in the thirteenth century 
by William of Lorris, and was finished in the latter part of that 
century by John of Meung, being a poem of over twenty-two 
thousand lines. It is an allegorical love-poem, in which the 
timid grace and the romantic sentiment of its first maker are 
followed by the boldness, the wit, and the vigor of its second 
maker, who had no compassion for polished hypocrisy, and 
annoyed priests by his satire, and court ladies with a rude esti- 
mate of their prevailing character. 

This poem had acquired great popularity throughout Europe, 
when Chaucer put somewhat less than half of it into English 
verse, under the title of ''The Romaunt of the Rose," the 
translator allowing himself some freedom both of amplification 
and of abridgment, and often using that freedom to improve 
greatly upon the original. 

It is probable, that, even at an earlier period of his life, 
Chaucer made his " Translation of Boethius," which reads like 
a student's exercise. In the original work, prose is interspersed 
with poetry ; and it is remarkable, that, in his translation, young 
Chaucer forbore to exercise his skill in English verse, and put 
the entire book of Boethius into prose. 

6, Chaucer's first original work was probably " The Court of 
Love," — a poem which so clearly derives its allegorical form 
from a stud}' of " Le Roman de la Rose," that it might most 
naturally have come into the mind of Chaucer while he was at 
work on his translation of that poem. But, through forms 
which he was to outgrow, Chaucer already spoke like himself. 
In this ' ' Court of Love ' ' he struck the key-note of his future 



78 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

harmonies. The most characteristic feature of his poetry at 
once appears in it. 

The author is represented as " Philogenet of Cambridge, clerk," 
ashamed to think that he is eighteen years old and has not yet paid ser- 
vice at the Conrt of Love. He journeys thither, and what does he find ? 
Venus, of course, is the goddess worshipped. But, under her, the mythi- 
cal Admetus and Alcestis, through whom marriage was idealized, are 
King and Queen of Love, and they live in a castle painted within and 
without with daisies. This reading of love, and the use of the daisy as 
its type, is Chaucer's own, repeated sometimes in form, and in spirit 
pervading all the work of his life. For Chaucer alone, in his time, felt 
the whole beauty of womanhood, and felt it most in its most perfect 
type, — in wifehood, with the modest graces of the daisy, with its sooth- 
ing virtues, and its power of healing inward, wounds. Physicians in his 
day ascribed such power to the daisy, which, by Heaven's special blessing, 
was made common to all, and was outward emblem also of the true and 
pure wife in its heart of gold and its white crown of innocence. That 
is what Chaucer meant when he told in later writing of his reverence for 
the daisy, and identified Alcestis with it. Why Alcestis ? She was the 
wife of that Admetus to whom the Fates had given promise that he 
should not die, if, when the hour came, his father, mother, or wife would 
die for him. This his wife did, and was brought back from the dead 
by Hercules. The poem is an ideal of wifely devotion and a mythical 
upholding of true marriage. Chaucer here worked upon the lines of the 
French poets, introduced even a code distinctly founded upon that of the 
Courts of Love, which were in his time still popular in France ; but it 
was not in him to adopt the playful fiction of these courts. He had what 
we might now call his own English sense of the domestic side of their 
one courtly theme, not represented even by the English literature of his 
day; and at once he became, alone in his own time, and more distinc- 
tively than any who followed him, the reverencer of the daisy, as he 
understood his flower, — the poet of a true and perfect womanhood. 

7. Of less interest, but still important, is another point to be 
noted in Chaucer's " Court of Love." It includes stanzas trans- 
lated from one of those poems with which Boccaccio was then 
delighting every educated reader of Italian who could buy or 
borrow copies. It is also in the peculiar seven-lined stanza, 
which should be called " Chaucer's stanza," since, probably in 
the course of such translation, it was evidently formed by him 
out of the octave rhyme which Boccaccio was then first introdu- 
cing into literature. Putting like letters to stand for rlrymes, the 
rhyming in the eight lines of Boccaccio's stanza runs a b a b a b 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 79 

c c, in which the system of the harmony is obvious. In the 
old Sicilian octave rhyme the verse had simply alternated. Boc- 
caccio turned the closing lines into a couplet, and so gave to 
the whole measure a sense of perfectness, while adding to its 
music. Omitting Boccaccio's fifth line and its rhyme, Chaucer 
made his new stanza run a b a b b c c. Here there are seven 
lines, three on each side of a middle line, which is that upon 
which all the music of the stanza turns : it is the last of a 
quatrain of alternate rhymes, and first of a quatrain of couplets. 
The stanza thus produced has a more delicate music than the 
Italian octave rhyme out of which it was formed, and it re- 
mained a favorite with English poets till the time of Queen 
Elizabeth. Because it was used by a nyyal follower of Chau- 
cer's, it has been called " rhyme royal." Let us rather call it 
" Chaucer's stanza." 

8. Chaucer's "Court of Love" was court poetry; and the 
next evidence we have of the course of his life shows that he 
had obtained footing at court as an attendant upon the young 
princes, Lionel of Antwerp and John of Gaunt. So far as re- 
gards his court service, Chaucer's life and poetry are especially 
associated with the friendship and patronage of John of Gaunt ; 
and we come now to a group of his poems which seems to have 
been distinctly written for this prince. In 1359, being then but 
nineteen years old, John of Gaunt married Blanche, aged also 
nineteen, second of two daughters of Henry, Duke of Lancas- 
ter, the first prince of the blood after the children of the king. 
Chaucer's " Assembly of Foules," or, as it is sometimes called, 
"Parliament of Birds," was most probably a poem written for 
John of Gaunt in 1358, during his courtship of this lady. If so, 
the argument implies, that, when she was eighteen, there were 
three noble suitors for the hand of the great heiress ; that one 
of them, whose cause the poet advocates, was the king's son ; 
and that her marriage was postponed for a } T ear. The poem is, 
like "The Court of Love," in Chaucer's stanza, and is in the 
form of a dream, opening and closing with suggestion of the 
author as a close student of books. He always reads, he saj^s ; 
he surely hopes so to read that some day he shall be the better 
for his study ; " and thus to read I will not spare." 



80 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

In the opening of this poem Chancer represents himself as 
reading with delight a beautiful fragment of the sixth book of 
Cicero "On the Republic," which contains the doctrine of the 
soul's immortalit}- in "The Dream of Scipio " (" Somnium 
Scipionis"). To this fragment a wide influence was given 
among educated readers of the middle ages, — an influence 
which even Dante felt. It ma}' be named as the work which, 
next to "The Romaunt of the Rose," had chief influence in 
determining a fashion of court literature for allegorical inci- 
dents in form of dream. We find the fashion illustrated in 
" The Assembly of Foules," and other of the earlier works of 
Chaucer, and in the literature of succeeding time, until the 
great development of new thought and new forms of writing 
in the da} T s of Queen Elizabeth. 

In telling the dream which forms the story of " The Assembly of 
Foules," Chaucer shows, as in " The Court of Love," the enjoyment 
with which he had then received the narrative poems of Boccaccio. 
Sixteen stanzas of the " Teseide," which describe Cupid at a fountain 
tempering his arrows, and the crouched Venus herself, are translated 
in sixteen stanzas of " The Assembly of Foules," and they are trans- 
lated in a way that* places beyond question Chaucer's knowledge of 
Italian. The turns of phrase make it quite evident that Chaucer wrote 
with the Italian original before him. 

9. Chaucer's " Complaint of the Black Knight," which is also 
written in Chaucer's stanza, professes to record what the poet 
heard of the complaint of a knight whom false tongues had 
hindered of his lad} T 's grace ; and the poem, probably, was 
designed for John of Gaunt to present to his lady on occasion 
of some small misunderstanding incident to clays of courtship. 
It is a court poem of French pattern, thoroughly conventional, 
expressing unreal agonies by the accepted formulas ; and in it 
the natural genius of Chaucer appears only in some touches at 
the close. 

10. Chaucer's great patron, John of Gaunt, was married in 
May, 1359 ; and, five months afterward, Chaucer himself was 
in the army which Edward III. then led against France ; first 
laying unsuccessful siege to Rheims ; next advancing on Paris, 
and burning its suburbs ; and then suffering famine so severe, 
that the English host was compelled to retreat towards Brit- 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 81 

tany, leaving a track of dead upon its way. It was in Brittany 
that Chaucer was taken prisoner Ivy the French ; and as peace 
was signed in May, 1360, it is supposed, that, unless ransomed 
before that time, he was then released. This, however, is only 
conjecture ; and nothing is known of Chaucer's life for the next 
seven years. At the end of that time, in 1367, when he was 
thirty-nine years old, he was still attached to the king's house- 
hold, and he received in that year a salary of twenty marks for 
life, or until he should be otherwise provided for, in considera- 
tion of his former and future services. 

11. It was probably about this time that Chaucer married 
Philippa Roet, one of the ladies in attendance on the queen, 
eldest daughter of Sir Payne Roet, and sister of Katherine, 
third wile of John of Gaunt. To this time, therefore, ma} T be 
assigned, with some probability, the exquisite poem known as 
"Chaucer's Dream." 

Throughout this poem there is a delicate play of fairy fancy. It is in 
the light octosyllabic rhyme, which came in almost with the first Eng- 
lish poems written after the Conquest, telling how the poet found him- 
self, in dream, the only man in a marvellous island of fair ladies, whose 
queen was gone over the sea to a far rock to pluck three magic apples, 
upon which their bliss and well-being depended. But she returned, and 
with her came the Poet's Lady, by whom the Queen of that Isle of Pleas- 
aunce had found herself forestalled. The Poet's Lady bad been found 
already on the far rock, with the magic apples in her hand. A Knight 
also had there claimed the unlucky Queen as his; but the Poet's Lady 
had comforted her, had graciously put into her hand one of the apples, 
and had brought in her own ship both Queen and Knight home to the 
pleasant island. There its fair ladies all knelt to the Poet's Lady. The 
Knight would have died of the Queen's rigor if she had not revived him 
by some acts of kindness, after which she was resolved to bid him go. 
But then there were seen sailing to that island ten thousand ships; and 
the God of Love himself made all resistance vain. Many knights landed; 
and the Queen of the Isle, being overcome, presented to the Lord of Love 
a bill declaring her submission. The God of Love also paid homage to the 
Poet's Lady, and, himself pleading to her the Poet's cause, laughed as he 
told her his name. At last, after a multitude of marvellous incidents, 
there was a marriage-festival; and all, except the Poet, had been thus 
happily married, when, during a whole day, they besought of the Poet's 
Lady grace for him also. She yielded, and their marriage was to be 
that night. Then the happy Poet was led into a great tent that served 
for church, and there was solemn service, with rejoicing afterwards, of 



82 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

which the loud sound woke him from his dream. He was alone then, 
in the old forest lodge, where he had slept, and was left in grief to pray 
that his Lady would give substance to his dreaming, or that he might go 
back into his dream and always serve her in the Isle of Pleasaunce. He 
ended his verse with a balade, bidding his innocent heart go forth to her 
who may "give thee the bliss that thou desirest oft." 

12. We suppose Chaucer's marriage to have been about the 
year 1367. It was two years afterward, in September, 1369, 
that his illustrious patron lost his wife, the Duchess Blanche, 
in the courtship of whom, eleven years before, Chaucer's poems, 
" Assembly of Foules " and " Complaint of the Black Knight," 
are believed to have assisted. So the devoted poet mourns her 
death in his "Book of the Duchess," a court poem in eight- 
syllabled rhyming verse, with the customary dream, Ma} 7 morn- 
ing, and so forth, the romance figure of Emperor Octavian, 
from the tale of Charlemagne, and a chess play, with Fortune 
imitated, almost translated, from a favorite passage of " Le 
Roman de la Rose." Thus far a follower of the court fash- 
ions, Chaucer is in this poem himself a celebrater of that home 
delight of love over which Alcestis was queen under Venus. 
It is faithful wedded love that the "Book of the Duchess" 
honors. We have here also the individual portrait of a gentle- 
woman who had been the poet's friend, and in whom he had 
seen a pattern of pure womanly grace and wifely worth. The 
Duchess Blanche left one son, about three years old, who be- 
came King Henry IV. To him, in his childhood, Chaucer 
must have been familiar as his father's household friend, and, 
doubtless, often welcome as a plajiellow. 

13. In the spring and summer of 1370 Chaucer was abroad 
on the king's service ; and again, in November, 1372, being 
henceforth entitled an esquire, was made one of a commission 
that was to proceed to Italy, and treat with the duke, citizens, 
and merchants of Genoa for the choice of some port on the 
English coast at which the Genoese might establish a commer- 
cial factoiy. Upon such business he was in Italy, both at 
Florence and Genoa, in the } T ear 1373. This was a 3-ear before 
the death of Petrarch, — the 3 T ear, also, in which Petrarch wrote 
that moralized Latin version of Boccaccio's tale of Griselda, 
which was afterwards followed by Chaucer in his " Clerk's 



To A. D. 1400.I CHAUCER. 83 

Tale," and of which he made his Clerk say that it was 
4 'learned at Padua of a worthy clerk, . . . Francis Petrarch, 
the laureate poet." Chaucer is likely to have sought speech 
with so great a master of his art. He might also, during this 
visit to Italy, have spoken with Boccaccio, then living at Ven- 
ice, and within but two years of his death ; for Petrarch died in 
1374, Boccaccio in 1375. Our own poet was home again at 
the close of November, 1373, and was paid for his service and 
expenses ninety-two pounds, which would be worth more than 
nine hundred pounds in present A^alue. In April of the next 
year, 1374, on St. George's Da}', a grant was made to Chaucer 
of a daily pitcher of wine from the hands of the king's butler. 
This he received till the accession of Richard II., when, instead 
of the wine, twenty marks a year were paid as its money 
value. Less than two months after the grant of daily wine, 
Chaucer owed also to John of Gaunt' s good-will a place under 
government as comptroller of the customs and subsid}- of 
wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London. The 
rolls of his office were to be written with his own hand, and 
none of his duties might be done by deputy. Only three days 
after he had been enriched with this appointment, John of 
Gaunt made in his own name a personal grant to Chaucer of 
ten pounds (represented now by one hundred pounds) a 3-ear 
for life, payable at the manor of Savoy, in consideration of 
good service rendered b} T Chaucer and his wife Philippa to the 
said duke, to his consort, and to his mother the queen. In 
November of the following year, 1375, Chaucer received, from 
the crown, custody of a rich ward, Edmund Staplegate of 
Kent ; and this wardship brought him a marriage-fee of one 
hundred and four pounds, represented now by ten times that 
amount. Two months later Chaucer obtained another ward- 
ship of less value ; and in another half-year he was presented 
with the fine paid by an evader of wool-duties, — a gift worth 
more than seven hundred pounds of our mone} T . 

14. The works of Chaucer hitherto described form a distinct 
group, marked by the predominating influence of French court 
poetry. Every young poet must acquire the mechanism of his 
art by imitation ; and the fashion among poets in his younger 



84 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1350 

days caused Chaucer to learn his art, in the first instance, as an 
imitator of the trouveres. His individuality is shown from the 
first, as in the honor paid to marriage ; though his models are 
not of the best, and they do not quicken the development of 
independent strength. But, as Chaucer became more and more 
familiar with the great poets of Italy, their vigorous artistic 
life guided his riper genius to full expression of its powers. 
Before the age of forty he had, perhaps, not fully outgrown the 
influences of his early training. When he had passed the age 
of forty, Chaucer's writing shows, with the best qualities of 
his own independent genius, that, where he looked abroad at all 
for a quickening influence, it was not to France, but to the 
great Italian writers, — Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. We 
thus enter the second period of Chaucer's literary life, — a 
period in which the poet felt more and more strongly the im- 
pulse toward independent song, but in which the strongest 
external influence is derived from the higher strain of Italian 
literature. 

The first poem falling in this second period is his " Troilus 
and Cressida." which is a free version of Boccaccio's- " Filos- 
trato," out of octave rhyme into Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. 
In his rendering of the Italian story- the English poet not only 
so dealt with the baser incidents as to breathe pure air through 
an unwholesome tale, and even somewhat to spoil the first 
charm of the story-telling by interpolation of good counsel : 
but, for love of honesty, he so transformed the character of 
Pandarus in every respect as to make of it a new creation, rich 
with a dramatic life that is to be found, outside Chaucer, in no 
other work of imagination before Shakespeare. Chaucer may 
have been at work upon his poem, which is in five books and 
8,251 lines, in the last years of the reign of Edward III., who 
died in 1377. Ripeness of age is indicated not only by the 
breadth and depth of insight shown in the character-painting, 
but maj' be inferred also from the grave didactic tone that inter- 
rupts from time to time the light strains of a love-story. Such 
fine hath Troilus for love, says Chaucer, at the close : young 
fresh folks, he or she, look God ward, and think this world but a 
fair. Love Him who bought our souls upon the cross, and whose 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 85 

love never will be false to 3-011. Such stories as this the old 
clerks tell of the world's wretched appetites, and of the guerdon 
for travail in service of the heathen gods. 

" O moral Gower, this book I direct 

To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, 
To vouchsafe there need is to correct, 
Of your benignities and zeale's good." 

And the book ends with a prayer that Christ may make us 
wortln* of his mere}-. 

15. Richard II. began to reign in 1377, and continued upon 
the throne until 1399, one year before the death of Chaucer; 
and during all this time we are to imagine Chaucer as chief in 
renown of all English poets and men of letters. Of his ditties 
and glad songs the land full filled was over all. And the next 
important poem of his that we meet is " The House of Fame." 
The poem, in three books of octos3'llabic rlfyme, opened with 
a dream of the Temple of Venus, which is of glass, in a wide 
wilderness of sand. The poet, praying to be saA r ed from phan- 
tom or illusion, was carried up b}- an eagle like that which 
swooped in dream upon Dante in the ninth canto of the 
'•Purgatory;" and in "The House of Fame" we find very 
distinct traces of the influence of Dante on the mind of a great 
fellow-poet. In Chaucer there was, indeed, no gloom ; but he 
penetrated none the less deeply to the heart of human life, be- 
cause he had faith in God's shaping of the universe, was kindly 
and ever cheerful, and knew how to be wise without loss of the 
homely pla3fulness that comes of bright fane}' and a heart at 
ease. The eagle of the poem said to the poet : You have 
taken pains with 3-our love-singing, and have been a quiet 
student ; therefore 3-ou are being taken up to see the House of 
Fame. You hear little about }~our neighbors, said the eagle to 
him. 'When you have done the reckonings of 3'our da} T 's office 
work (over the books relating to the customs and subsicby of 
wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London) , 

" Thou goest home to thine house anone, 
And allso dumb as a stone 
Thou sittest at another book 
Till fully dazed is thy look, 
And livest thus as an hermite, 
Although thine al stine^ce is lite." 



86 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

Chaucer enjoyed life and good fare. But the man of genius 
wins only by hard work a fame that is to live through many 
centuries ; and Chaucer, happy among hooks, which are men 
disembodied, as among men in the flesh, was a hard-working 
student. As for the House of Fame, which he was permitted 
to look into, he found it. he said, the place between heaven. 
earth, and sea. to which all rumors fall : and his .description 
of it began with a reminiscence of the invocation at the opening 
of Dante's "Paradise." But in invoking "Apollo. God of 
Science and of Light." Chaucer modestly avoids following- 
Dante in the suggestion that he will crown himself with a few 
leaves of Apollo's laurel. He says only that he will go 

''Unto the nest laurer I see 
And kiss it. for it is thy tree." 

Then Chaucer described the House of Fame as he saw it on 
a rock of ice. inscribed with names of men once famous. Many 
were melted or melting away : lout the graving of the names of 
men of old fame was as fresh as if just written, for they were 
" conserved with the shade." The description of the House is 
one of the brightest creations of Chaucer's fancy. There is a 
grand suggestiveness. a true elevation of thought, in the plain 
words that conjure up images, clearly defined and brightly 
colored, which do not rise only to melt in air and be no more. 
They pass into the reader's inner house of thought, and live 
there. 

Of the goddess who sat within, some asked fame for their good works, 
and were denied good or had fame. Others who had deserved well were 
trumpeted by slander. Others obtained their due reward. Some who 
had done well desired their good works to he hidden, and had their 
asking. Others made like request, hut had their deeds trumpeted 
through the clarion of gold. Some who had done nothing asked and 
had fame for deeds only to he done by labor; others who had asked like 
favor were jested at through the black clarion. Chaucer himself re- 
fused to he petitioner. Enough, if his name were lost after his death, 
that he "best knew what he suffered, what he thought. He would drink, 
he said, of the cup given to him. and do his best in his own art. From 
the House of Fame he was taken by the eagle to the whirling House of 
Rumor, full of reports and of lies shaped as shipmeu and pilgrims, 
pardoners, runners, and messengers. Every rumor flew first to Fame, 
who gave it name and duration. In a corner of this House of Rumor 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 87 

Chaucer saw men crowding about one who told love-stories. The 
clamor about this shadow of himself awoke him from his dream. Then, 
being awake, he remembered how high and far he had been in the spirit. 

" W~herefore to study and read alway 
I purpose to do day by day." 

16. The next important poem of Chaucer's, "The Legend of 
Good Women," could not have been published before 1382. Not 
content with all that he had done to give womanly delicacy to the 
character of Cressida in the earlier part of the poem relating 
to her, and to draw the noblest moral from her fall, he felt even 
yet that the beauty of pure womanhood was clouded hy her stor}\ 
He set to work, therefore, upon "The Legend of Good 
Women " with the avowed purpose of satisfying by his writings 
his own sense of what is good and just. But the suggestion 
even of this series of poems Chaucer derived from Boccaccio, 
whose collection of one hundred and five stories of illustrious 
women, told briefly and pleasant!}- in Latin prose, includes 
nearly all of those whom Chaucer celebrated ; a remarkable 
omission being that ideal wife Alcestis, long since enshrined 
in our poet's verse as Queen of Love. Chaucer's stories of 
good women probably were written in various years, and repre- 
sent the steadiness with which he paid, through life, what he 
calls reverence to the daisy. The book, when finished, was to 
be given, on behalf of Alcestis, to the queen, Anne of Bohe- 
mia, wife of Richard II. 

17. During the first decade of the reign of Richard II., in 
which time Chaucer's poetic life seems to have been expressed 
by these two poems, " The House of Fame " and " The Legend 
of Good Women," his outward life was that of ti diplomatist, 
a courtier, and a politician. In 1378, within a }~ear after the 
accession of Richard II., he had been twice sent abroad on 
diplomatic service, — in Januan T , with the Earl of Huntingdon, 
to France, to treat of the king's marriage ; and in May, with 
Sir Edward Berkele}', to Lombard}', to treat on affairs concern- 
ing the king's war, when the shores of England la} T at the 
mercy of the French and Spaniards. In 1382 the friendship of 
John of Gaunt had procured for Chaucer another office under 
government. Retaining his post as comptroller of wool cus- 



88 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

toms, he became also comptroller of the petty customs in the 
port of London, with liberty to do the work of that office by 
deputy. In Februaiy, 1385, he was released from all com- 
pulsoiy. work for his salaries by being allowed . to appoint a 
permanent deputy in the office of wool customs. In 1386 he 
sat as one of the members for Kent in the Parliament which 
met on the 1st of October. The French were then threatening 
England with invasion ; and the great barons, headed by the 
king's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, were active for the over- 
throw of the king's corrupt administration. Jchn of Gaunt 
was then away with an army in Portugal, upon affairs arising 
out of his relation to Castile. 

In the Parliament which had Chaucer — acting, of course, 
with the king's party — among its members, there arose a trial 
of strength. After three weeks of struggle, Richard was com- 
pelled to abandon his chancellor, the Earl of Suffolk, to a prose- 
cution b}- the Commons, and to submit himself for twelve 
months to a commission of regenc}*. Two famous noblemen of 
the cla3 T , the Earl of Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel, as 
leaders of the opposition, were included in this commission. 
It was to inquire into the conduct of officials of all kinds, and 
into gifts and pardons granted in the name of the crown ; it 
was to hear and decide on all griefs of the people which could 
not be redressed by common course of law, and to provide for 
all abuses such remedies as might seem to it good and profita- 
ble. The commission was appointed on the 19th of Novem- 
ber, 1386. It began with an examination of the accounts of 
officers employed in the collection of the revenue. On the 
10th of December it dismissed Chaucer from his office of 
comptroller of the wool customs. Ten days later it dismissed 
him also from his other office of comptroller of the petty cus- 
toms. 

18. During at least a part of the year's rule of this commis- 
sion of regenc} T , Chaucer seems to have been in Guienne with 
John of Gaunt, who was there marrying Philippa, his daughter 
by his first wife, Duchess Blanche, to King John I. of Portugal. 
The marriage was graced by Chaucer w T ith his poem of "The 
Flower and the Leaf." The flower and the leaf represented 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 89 

two of the badges usual in mediaeval heraldry. A flower, the 
rose, is the badge of England ; a leaf, the shamrock, is the 
badge of Ireland. In Chaucer's time there was a current argu- 
ment in chivalry as to the relative significance of leaves and 
flowers. Eustache Deschamps, nephew and pupil of Guillaume 
Machault, with an eye to the roses of England, wrote in honor 
of Philippa, upon the occasion of the wedding, a poem giving 
to the flower superiority over the leaf, as having fairer scent, 
color, and promise of fruit. There can be but little doubt that 
Chaucer's poem was, from the English side, a return compli- 
ment to the bridegroom. John of Portugal, a man of thirty, 
had fought for his throne, and owed both that and his wife to 
success in battle. He was a soldier-king, who lived to be called 
John the Great ; and Chaucer's poem, written in the person of 
a lady, — the bride-elect, — gives the chief honor to the laurel, 
meed of mighty conquerors. "Unto the leaf," she says, "I 
owe mine observaunce." 

19. To this part of Chaucer's life ma}' belong also the poem 
of " The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." Master Nicholas of 
Guildford had sung of the contest overheard b} T him between 
the owl and nightingale about two hundred }*ears before Chaucer 
sang of what he, also, had overheard between the nightingale 
and cuckoo. But, two hundred years before Chaucer, the birds 
were rude ; each bragged of himself, and made contemptuous 
attacks upon the other. The only question was, Which is the 
better bird? Now, in the contest between nightingale and 
cuckoo, the cuckoo, indeed, is a bird of bad manners ; but he 
does not affront the nightingale with personalities. He is rude 
because he flouts at love, which is the subject of discussion. 
The poem is based on a popular superstition that they will be 
happ}* in love during the year who hear the nightingale before 
the cuckoo. If the}- hear the cuckoo first, it is the worse for 
them. No date can be suggested for the poem, which seems to 
belong to Chaucer's second period, and like " The Flower and 
the Leaf," Avhich was no doubt written in 1387, during the da}*s 
of terror for the king's party, shows that Chaucer was a man 
whom no adversity could sour. 

20. In May, 1389, King Richard suddenly asked his uncle 



90 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

Gloucester how old he was, and, being told that he was in his 
twent} T -second } r ear, said he must then certainly be of an age to 
manage his own concerns. So he dismissed his council, took 
the government into his own hands, and left his uncle Glouces- 
ter to retire into the country ; while John of Gaunt was desired 
to return to England. By this court revolution Chaucer profited. 
On the 12th of July in the same year he was appointed clerk 
of the works at the Palace of Westminster, Tower of London, 
Castle of Berkhamstead, and at about a dozen royal manors 
and lodges, and at the mews for the king's falcons at Charing 
Cross. He might serve by deputy ; and his salary was two 
shillings a day, which would be about twent} 7 in present value. 
In November of the same year John of Gaunt returned to Lon- 
don. But in 1391 Chaucer, for some unknown reason, ceased 
to hold office as clerk of the king's works. His means were 
then very small ; indeed, it does not appear that he had other 
income than the ten pounds a year (say now one hundred 
pounds) for life granted in 1374 by John of Gaunt, and his 
allowance of forty shillings half-yearly for robes as the king's 
esquire. And it was at this date, 1391, that he wrote for his 
son Lewis, ten years old, a book of instruction, "Bread and 
Milk for Babes," or the " Conclusions of the Astrolabe," 
simply and tenderly — true to the pure domestic feeling that 
shines through his verse — employed in a father's duty of 
encouraging his child's taste for ennobling studies. He had 
given the bo}^ an astrolabe ; and the little treatise was to 
show him how to use it, as far as a child could. Some of its 
uses, he said, " be too hard for thy tender age of ten }~ears to 
conceive. By this treatise, divided in five parts, will I show 
thee wonder light rules and naked words in English ; for Latin ne 
canst thou not yet but small, my little son. But, nevertheless, 
sufficeth to thee these true conclusions in English, as well as 
sufficeth to those noble clerks, Greeks, these same conclusions 
in Greek, and to the Arabians in Arabic, and to Jews in 
Hebrew, and to the Latin folk in Latin ; which Latin folk had 
them first out of divers other languages, and wrote them in 
their own tongue, that is to say in Latin. . . . And, Lewis, 
if it so be that I show thee in my little English as true conclu- 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 91 

sions touching this matter, and not only as true, but as many 
and subtle conclusions, as be showed in Latin in any common 
treatise of the astrolabe, con me the more thanks, and pray 
God save the king that is the lord of this language." 

This treatise on the astrolabe is of special interest, as the 
only example of his prose-writing that remains to us besides 
the two prose stories in " The Canterbury Tales," called " The 
Tale of Meliboeus " and " The Parson's Tale." There is an- 
other prose work that has been attributed to Chaucer, — " The 
Testament of Love ; ' ' but it is probable that this belongs 
among the spurious writings attributed to him. 

21. We now come to the last and the most glorious period of 
the life of Chaucer, when he was at work upon " The Canter- 
bury Tales." He must have lost his wife about the year 1387. 
She left him two sons, — an elder son, Thomas, and the Lewis 
for whom the treatise on the astrolabe was written. In 1394 
Chaucer, whose means then were very small, received from the 
king a pension of twenty pounds a 3-ear for life, payable half- 
3^early, — at Michaelmas and Easter. In 1395 Chaucer's 
straitened means were indicated hy four borrowings from the 
exchequer of money in advance. There was but one such bor- 
rowing in 1396 ; but there were four again in 1397. In the fol- 
lowing 3'ear Chaucer was ver}' poor. In May he obtained the 
king's letters of protection from arrest, on any plea, except 
it were connected with land, for the next two jears, on the 
ground of ''various arduous and urgent duties in divers parts 
of the realm of England." After this, Chaucer, on account 
either of sickness or of occupation, did not apply for money 
personally ; but in July, 1398, within three months of his ob- 
taining letters of exemption from arrest, he sent to the ex- 
chequer for a loan of 6s. 8cL, — say £3. 6s. 8d. present value. 
In September, 1799, Richard II. publicly surrendered his 
crown to that Henry who then became Henry IV., who was 
the son of John of Gaunt and his first wife, the Duchess 
Blanche, and who from his childhood had been Chaucer's friend. 
Amid all his new prosperity Henry did not forget the poor old 
poet. On the 3d of October he granted to Chaucer forty marks 
a year, in addition to the smaller annuity that King Richard had 



92 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

given him. The old poet had then only a year to live : but 
his last year was freed from care. At Christmas he took the 
lease of a house in the garden of the Chapel of St. Mary. "West- 
minster ; and there he died, aged seventy-two. on the 25th of 
October, 1400. 

22. But these 3-ears of public turbulence and of private dis- 
tress could not darken the genius of Chaucer : they were made 
glorious by his partial performance of a task that lifts him up 
among the few great poets of all time. Work upon ; * The Can- 
terbury Tales " must have been the main occupation of the 
poet's latter days ; and the last words of the last tale in the 
papers, gathered together by the hand of his son Thomas, ma}' 
have been the last words from his pen. They look up to heaven. 
where " the body of man. that whilom was sick and frail, feeble 
and mortal, is immortal, and so strong and so whole, that there 
may no thing impair it ; there is neither hunger, nor thirst, nor 
cold, but every soul replenished with the sight of the perfect 
knowing of God. This blissful reign inay men purchase by pov- 
erty spiritual, and the glory by lowness, the plenty of joy by 
hunger and thirst, and rest by travail, and the life by. death and 
mortification of sin. To this life He us bring that bought us 
with his precious blood. Amen." Chaucer was one of the few 
greatest poets of the world who rise to a perception of its har- 
monies, and have a faith in God forbidding all despair of man. 
No troubles could extort from him a fretful note. Wisely. 
kindly, with shrewd humor, and scorn only of hypocrisy, he 
read the characters of men ; and, seeing far into their hearts, 
was, in his " Canterbury Tales." a dramatist before there was 
a drama, a poet who set the life of his own England to its 
proper music. 

In this work, had it been completed, the whole character of England 
would have been expressed, as it is already expressed or implied in the 
great fragment left to us. Boccaccio, who died twenty-five years before 
Chaucer, placed the scene of bis "Decameron" in a garden, to which 
seven fashionable ladies bad retired with three fashionable gentlemen, 
during the plague that devastated Florence in 134S. They told one 
another stories, usually dissolute, often witty, sometimes exquisitely 
poetical, and always in simple, charming prose. The purpose of these 
people was to forget the duties on which they had turned their backs, 



ToA.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 93 

and stifle any sympathies they might have had for the terrible grief of 
their friends and neighbors who were dying a few miles away. For these 
fine ladies and gentlemen, equal in rank and insignificance, Chaucer gave 
us a group of about thirty English people, of ranks widely different, in 
hearty human fellowship together. Instead of setting them down to 
lounge in a garden, he mounted them on horseback, set them on the high 
road, and gave them somewhere to go, and something to do. The bond 
of fellowship was not a common selfishness; it was religion; not, indeed, 
in a form so solemn as to make laughter and jest unseemly, yet, accord- 
ing to the custom of his day, a popular form of religion, — the pilgrim- 
age to the shrine of Thomas a Becket, — into which men entered with 
much heartiness. It happened to be a custom which had one of the best 
uses of religion, in serving as a bond of fellowship wherein conventional 
divisions of rank were for a time disregarded; partly because of the 
sense, more or less joined to religious exercise of any sort, that men are 
equal before God, and also, in no slight degree, because men of all ranks, 
trotting upon the high-road with chance companions, whom they might 
never see again, have been in all generations disposed to put off restraint, 
and enjoy such intercourse as will relieve the tediousness of travel. 
Boccaccio could produce nothing of mark in description of his ten fine 
gentlemen and ladies. The procession of Chaucer's pilgrims is the very 
march of man on the high road of life. 

From different parts of London or the surrounding country, 
Canterbury pilgrims met in one of the inns on the Southwark side 
of London Bridge, to set forth together upon the Kent road. 
Chaucer's pilgrims started from the tk Tabard," an inn named 
after the sleeveless coat once worn by laborers, now worn only 
in a glorified form by heralds. Chaucer feigns that he was at 
the k * Tabard," ready to make his own pilgrimage, wdien lie 
found a company of nine and twenty on the point of starting, 
and joined them, so making the number thirty. Harry Bailby, 
the host of the " Tabard," also joined the party, so making 
thirty-one. When Chaucer describes the pilgrims in his prol- 
ogue to " The Canterbury Tales," his list contains thirty-one, 
without reckoning the host. This little discrepancy is one of 
many reminders in the work itself that Chaucer died while it was 
incomplete. As he proceeded with his story-telling, he probably 
was modifying, to suit the development of his plan, several of the 
first-written details of his prologue. The pilgrims w r ere, 1, 2, 3, 
a knight, his son, and an attendant yeoman ; 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, a 
prioress, another nun who was her chaplain, and three priests ; 



94 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

9, 10, a monk and a friar ; 11, a merchant ; 12, a clerk of Ox- 
ford ; 13, a serjeant-at-law ; 14, a franklin, that is, a landholder 
free of feudal service, holding immediately from the king ; 15, 
16, 17, 18, 19, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, 
and a tapestry-maker ; 20, Roger, or Hodge, of Ware, a Lon- 
don cook ; 21, a sailor from the West country ; 22, a doctor of 
physic ; 23, Alisoun, a wife of Bath ; 24, 25, two brothers, — a 
poor town parson and a ploughman ; 26, a reeve, or lord's ser- 
vant, as steward or overseer ; 27, a miller ; 28, a sompnonr, or 
snmmoner of delinquents to the ecclesiastical courts; 29, a 
pardoner, who dealt in pardons from the Pope ; 30, a manciple 
of a lawyer's inn-of-court (a manciple was a biryer of victuals 
for a corporation) ; 31, Chaucer himself, who is described by 
32, Hany Bailly, the host, as one who looked on the ground as 
he would find a hare, seemed elvish by his countenance, for he 
did unto no wight dalliance, yet was stout ; for, says the host, 
" he in the waist is shape as well as I." 

Hany Bailly, large, bright-eyed, bold of speech, shrewd, 
manly, well-informed, had a shrew of a wife. He gave his 
guests a good supper, and jested merrily when the}' had paid 
their reckonings. It was the best company of pilgrims that had 
been at his inn that year, he said, and he should like to secure 
them mirth upon the way. The}' were all ready for his counsel ; 
and it was that each of them should tell two tales on the way 
to Canterbury, and two other tales on the way home. The one 
whose tales proved to be "■ of best sentence and of solas ' ' should 
have a supper in that room, at the cost of all, when they came 
back from Canterbury. He was to be their guide ; and whoever 
gainsaid his judgment was to pa}' for all they spent upon the 
way. All agreed, and appointed the host governor, judge, and 
reporter of the tales. Then wine was fetched ; they drank, and 
went to bed. The host roused them at dawn next morning, the 
28th of April (our 7th of May) , when the length of day was a 
few minutes over fifteen hours. The company rode slowly to 
the watering of St. Thomas, that is to say, of the Hospital of 
St. Thomas the Martyr in Southwark ; which may be called, in 
the series of church-stations, the London terminus of the line of 
pilgrimage to St. Thomas the Martyr's shrine at Canterbury. 



To A.D. 1400.] CHAUCER. 95 

Here the host reminded the companions of their undertaking ; 
and all, at his bidding, drew out slips by way of lot. Whoever 
had the shortest should begin. This wholesome device excluded 
all questions of precedence of rank among the fellow-pilgrims. 
The lot fell to the knight, whereat all were glad ; and with the 
courtesy of prompt assent he began. 

The knight's tale is the tale of " Palamon and Arcite," Englished by 
Chaucer, in spirit as well as language, from the "Teseide " of Boccaccio. 
The monk is asked for the next story; but the miller is drunk, and forces 
on his companions what he calls a noble tale. This is a coarse tale, told 
with vivid master-touches ; and, as its jest is against a carpenter, Oswald 
the reeve is provoked to match it with a coarser jest against a miller. 
An honest warning of their nature is placed by Chaucer before these 
two stories, which belong to the broad view of life, but show the low 
animal part of it : — 

"And therefore whoso list it not to hear, 
Turn over the leaf, and choose another tale ; 
For he shall find ynow both great and smale 
Of storial thing that toueheth gentilcsse, 
And eke morality and holiness." 

In plainest words the reader is warned beforehand, by the pure-hearted 
poet, of the character of these two stories, in order that they may be 
passed over by those who would avoid their theme. The miller's tale 
lias in its coarseness a rough moral at the close. The reeve's tale paints 
a form of life that we can well spare from the picture; yet it is taken 
from the "Decameron," and was put by Boccaccio, not, as by Chaucer, 
in a churl's mouth, but upon the lips of one of his fine ladies. After 
this, we find throughout, what we found in the knight's tale, Chaucer's 
sense of the pure beauty of womanhood. There is the whole range of 
character to be included in his picture; but on the fleshly side most nat- 
ural and genial are the touches with which he gives the wife of Bath her 
place among the company. Chaucer began a cook's tale of a riotous 
apprentice, as if he meant to read a lesson to the Perkin revellers of the 
day; but he broke off, weary of low themes. "The Tale of Gamelyn," 
a bright piece of the class of poetry to which the Robin Hood ballads 
belong, is here placed, as a cook's tale, in Chaucer's series. It may have 
been among his papers; but it probably is from another hand. "The 
Man of Law's Tale" is of a good woman, the pious Constance, and 
seems to have been taken from the second book of Gower's " Confessio 
Amantis." "The Wife of Bath's Tale," of a knight, Florentius, who 
by obedience won a perfect bride, is again one of the tales of the " Con- 
fessio Amantis." "The Friar's Tale" contemns the cruel rapacity of 
sompnours, and " The Sompnour's Tale " scorns hypocritical rapacity in 
friars. "The Clerk's Tale" is the story of the patience of Griselda, 



96 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

the last tale in the "Decameron," and one which Petrarch said none 
had been able to read without tears. Chaucer's poem is distinctly 
founded, not on the tale as it stands in the "Decameron," but upon 
Petrarch's moralized version. This we find throughout, from the form 
of opening down to the religious application at the end, and the citation 
of the general Epistle of St. James, in the stanzas beginning, — 

" For sith a woman was so patient 
Unto a mortal man, well more we ought 
Receiven all in gree that God us sent." 

But the poetical treatment of the story is so individual, that it all comes 
afresh out of the mind of Chaucer. Its pathos is heightened by the 
humanizing touch with which the English poet reconciles the most mat- 
ter-of-fact reader to its questionable aspects. He feels that the incidents 
of the myth are against nature, and at every difficult turn in the story 
he disarms the realist with a light passage of fence, and wins to his own 
side the host of readers who have the common English turn for ridicule 
of an ideal that conflicts with reason. Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale" is 
that afterwards modernized by Pope in his "January and May." His 
"Squire's Tale" is of the Tartar Cambys Kan, or Cambuscan, of his 
two sons Algarsif and Camballo, and of his daughter Canace, who had a 
ring enabling her to hear the speech of birds, and a mirror which showed 
coming adversity, or falsehood in a lover. This is a tale of enchantment 
left unfinished, with stately promise of a sage and solemn tune, and 
which suggested to.Milton the wish that the grave spirit of thoughtful- 
ness would raise Musseus or Orpheus, 

" Or call up him that left half told 
The story of Cambuscan hold; 
Of Camhall and of Algarsife, 
And who had Canace to wife 
That owned the virtuous ring and glass ; 
And of the wondrous horse of brass 
On which the Tartar king did ride." 

" The Franklin's Tale," to be found also in the "Decameron," was of a 
wife true of word as true of heart. The second "jSun's Tale" was of 
St. Cecilia, from "The Golden Legend," a treatise on church festivals, 
written at the end of the thirteenth contury by an archbishop of Genoa, 
Jacobus a. Voragine, and translated into French by Jehan de Vignoy. 
" The Pardoner's Tale " is a lesson against riotous living. Three profli- 
gates would slay death, the slayer of the young. An old man said they 
would find him under an oak in the wood. They found there nearly 
eight bushels of gold florins. At this they rejoiced, and cast lots which 
of them should go to the town to fetch bread and wine while the others 
watched the treasure. The lot fell on the youngest. While he was gone, 
his comrades plotted to kill him on his return, that the gold might be 
divided between two only; and he himself plotted to poison two of tbe 
bottles of wine he brought, that all the gold might belong to himself 



To A . D . 1 400. ] CHA UCER. 97 

alone. So they slew him, and had short mirth afterwards over the wine 
he had poisoned. 

" The Shipman's Tale," from the "Decameron," was of a knavish 
young monk. The prioress told the legend of a Christian child killed by 
the Jews in Asia. The child when living loved the Virgin, who appeared 
to it when dying and put a grain under its tongue, so that the dead 
child-martyr still sang, "O alma Redemptoris Mater." Until the grain 
was removed, the song continued. Chaucer himself began " The Rhyme 
of Sir Thopas," a merry burlesque upon the metrical romances of the 
day, ridiculing the profusion of trivial detail that impeded the progress 
of a story of tasteless adventures. Sir Thopas rode into a forest, where 
he lay down, and, as he had dreamed all night that he should have an elf- 
queen for his love, got on his horse again to go in search of the elf- 
queen; met a giant, whom he promised to kill next day, the giant throw- 
ing stones at him ; and came again to town to dress himself for the 
adventure. The pertinacity with which the rhyme proceeds to spin and 
hammer out all articles of clothing and armor worn by Sir Thopas 
makes the host exclaim at the story-teller, "Mine eare's aken for thy 
drasty speech," and cry, "No more!" The device, too, is ingenious, 
which puts the poet out of court in his own company, so far as regards 
the question who won the supper. His verse having been cried out 
upon, Chaucer answers the demand upon him for a tale in prose with 
" The Tale of Meliboeus," a moral allegory upon the duties of life. " The 
Monk's Tale" is of men in high estate who have fallen into hopeless 
adversity, — a series of short "tragedies," suggested by a popular Latin 
prose-book of Boccaccio's on the "Falls of Illustrious Men." Among 
the monk's examples is that of Ugolino, whereof Chaucer writes that 
they who would hear it at length should go to Dante, " the grete poete 
of Itaille," as he had said of any reader curious to hear more of Zeno- 
bia, "Let him unto my maister Petrarch go." The host at last stopped 
Piers the monk because his tales were dismal; and Sir John, the nun's 
priest, asked for something merry, told a tale of the Cock and the Fox, 
taken from the fifth chapter of the "Roman de Renart." 

Thus the pilgrims made for themselves entertainment by the way till 
they reached Boughton-under-Blean, seven miles from Canterbury, 
where they were overtaken by a canon's yeoman, who was followed by 
his master. These had ridden after the pilgrims for three miles. They 
seem to have followed them from Faversham, where the canon, a ragged, 
joyless alchemist, who lived in a thieves' lane of the suburb, was on the 
watch for travellers whom he might join, and dupe with his pretensions 
to a power of transmuting metals. This canon, said his man, after other 
flourishing as herald of his master, could pave all their road to Canter- 
bury with silver and gold. "I wonder, then," said Harry Bailly, "that 
your lord is so sluttish, if he can buy better clothes. • His overslop is not 
worth a mite; it is all dirty and torn." Chaucer proceeds then skilfully 
to represent the gradual but quick slide of the yeoman's faith from his 



98 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350. 

master, who, when lie caught up the company, found his man owning 
that they lived by borrowing gold of men who think that of a pound they 
can make two : 

" Yet it is false : and ay we have good hope 
It is for to doon, and after it we grope." 

The canon cried at his man for a slanderer. The host hade the man 
tell on, and not mind his master, who then turned and fled for shame, 
leaving the company to be entertained with '"The Canon's Yeoman's 
Tale,*' preluded with experience of alchemy. 

The manciple related after this the tale, from Ovid's "Metamor- 
phoses," of the turning of the crow from white to black for having told 
Apollo of the falsehood of his Coronis. There is then an indication of 
the time of day — four o'clock in the afternoon — before " The Par- 
son's Tale," which evidently was meant to stand last; for it is a long 
and earnest sermon in prose on a text applying the parable of a pilgrim- 
age to man's heavenward journey. The text is from Jeremiah, vi. 16, 
" Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the 
good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." 

23. Much debate is now going on among scholars respecting 
the genuineness of some of the writings attributed to Chancer. 
By F. J. Furnivall, for example, the genuineness of the follow- 
ing works is vehemently denied. — ki The Court of Love:"' 
'• The Craft of Rovers, and Remedy of Love ; " " The Lamenta- 
tion of Mary Magdalene;" ''The Eomannt of the Rose;" 
" The Complaint of the Black Knight ; " " Chaucer's Dream ; " 
" The Flower and the Leaf; " and " The Cuckoo and the Night- 
ingale." The argument against them is, that, in the earliest 
extant MSS-, Chaucer is not named as their author; that they 
contain many violations of Chaucer's usages in rhyme ; that 
some of them are ridiculously inferior to his certified works ; 
and. finally, that some of them are obviously of a date later than 
his life. The trial of the case, however, is still in xn'ogress, and 
the final verdict cannot yet be rendered. 



CHAPTER H. 

SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 
CHAUCER'S LITERARY CONTEMPORARIES. 

1. John Gower; his Balades; "Speculum Meditantis;" "Vox Clamantis;" "Con- 
fessio Amantis;" his Later Tears; "Tripartite Chronicle." — 2. William 
Langland ; "The Vision of Piers Ploughman;" Imitations of it. — 3. John 
Barbour; "Bruce." — 4. Sir John Mandeville ; "Travels." — 5. JohnWiclif.— 
6. John Trevisa; "Translation of Higden's Polychronicon." — 7. Ralph 
Strode. 

1. Though Chaucer had no peer in genius during his own 
time, there were among his contemporaries several strong men 
of letters, of whom three were poets, — John Gower, William 
Langland, and John Barbour; and three were p rose-writers, — 
Sir John Maude ville, John Wiclif, and John Trevisa. 

John Gower was a gentleman of Kent, close kindred to a 
wealth}- knight, Sir Robert Gower. The date of his birth is not 
known ; but he survived Chaucer eight years, djing, a blind 
old man, in the year 1408. It is likely that he was born two 
or three 3-ears before Chaucer. He was well educated ; wrote 
with ease in French, Latin, and English ; and used coat armor 
at a time when such matters had significance. We know that 
he had landed property in several counties, — Essex, Norfolk, 
Suffolk, and Kent. Among the pleasant hills of Otford in 
Kent, Gower was at home in the reign of Edward III. as a 
country gentleman who had neither wish nor need to live at 
court. He wrote, in these his earlier days, verse, not merely 
according to the fashion of France, but in French. There 
remains a collection of his French exercises in love-poetry, 
"Balades," — a form of Provencal verse not in the least re- 
lated to the Northern ballad. A balade is a love-poem in three 
stanzas of seven or eight (usually seven) lines, and a final qua- 
train. Gower wrote five of his balades for those who " look for 

99 



100 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

the issue of their love in honest marriage." The other forty- 
five are of the usual kind, mere variations on the given theme, 
" universal to all the world, according to the properties and con- 
ditions of lovers who are diversely experienced in the fortune of 
love." 

Gower wrote also three long poems, — one in French, one in 
Latin, one in English. The one in French is lost. It was 
divided into twelve books, treating of the vices and virtues, 
and of the various degrees of men seeking — as a contempo- 
raiy described it — to teach by a right path the way whereby 
a transgressed sinner ought to return to the knowledge of his 
Creator. That first work, called the " Speculum Meditantis " 
("Mirror of one Meditating"), was written, no doubt, in the 
reign of Edward III., and was probably the book which earned 
for the poet, from his friend Chaucer, the name of "Moral 
Gower." 

In the earlier daj-s of Richard II., John Gower was still 
living at his home in Kent ; and in Ma} T , 1381, he was in the 
very midst of the tumult connected with the uprising of the 
men of Kent and the men of Essex, led on by Wat Tyler, Jack 
Straw, and John Ball. This event drew from John Gower his 
second great poem, the "Vox Clamantis " ("Voice of One 
Cr}i.ng ") , in seven books of Latin elegiacs. 

In its first book Gower told of the revolt allegorically, in the form of 
a dream of beasts who have changed their nature. A voice admonished 
him quickly to write what he had seen and heard ; for dreams often con- 
tain warnings of the future. 

In his second book, being awake, he did begin to write, invoking no 
muse but the Holy Spirit. If he seem unpolished to the reader, let the 
reader spare the faults, and look to the inner meaning of his work. 
And again and again he asks that the soul of his book, not its mere 
form, be looked to. "The Voice of One Crying" shall be the name of 
his volume, because there are written in it the words that come of a 
fresh grief. Then he went on to utter what was in his heart. There is 
no blind fortune ruling the affairs of men ; they go ill or well according 
to the manner in which men fulfil their duties before God. As we do, 
so we rejoice or suffer. There is no misfortune, no good luck. What- 
ever happens among us, for good or ill, comes with our own doing, — 
" nos sumus in causa." The object of Gower's "Vox Clamantis " was, 
therefore, to set the educated men, readers of Latin, to the task of find- 



To A.D. 1400.] GOWER. 101 

ing that disease within our social body of which the Jack Straw rebellion 
was but a symptom ; his plan was to go through all orders of society, and 
ask himself wherein each fell short of its duty. 

This he began to do in the third book, which has, like the second, a 
most earnest prelude. "I do not," Gower says, "affect to touch the 
stars, or write the wonders of the poles ; but rather, with the common 
human voice that is lamenting in this land, I write the ills I see. In the 
voice of my crying there will be nothing doubtful; for every man's 
knowledge will be its best interpreter." Then follows a passage which 
ought to be quoted by all teachers who would train young people to 
write. Gower prays that his verse may not be turgid; that there may 
be in it no word of untruth; that each word may answer to the thing it 
speaks of pleasantly and fitly; that he may flatter in it no one, and seek 
in it no praise above the praise of God. "Give me that there shall be 
less vice, and more virtue, for my speaking." 

Then he divided society into three classes, represented by clerk, 
soldier, and ploughman ; and to an unsparing review of their vices he 
devotes the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth books. The seventh and last 
book applied Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the state of society in England; 
man's hard avarice being the iron in the feet of the image, and his lusts 
the clay. Prelates, curates, priests, scholars, monks, friars, soldiers, 
merchants, lawyers, were degenerate. Gower declared, with this, his 
especial love for the land of his birth. He repeated that what he had 
written was not his own complaint, but the voice of the people revealed 
to him in his dream. It touches only the guilty; and may each correct 
his own fault where he finds it! "Here," he says, " is the voice of the 
people; but of ten where the people cries is God." And in the "Vox 
Clamantis " we do hear the voice that throughout the literature of the 
English people labors to maintain the right and to undo the wrong. 

Between Gower and Chaucer there seems alwaj^s to have 
been a devoted friendship. When, in the first 3'ear of Richard's 
reign, Chaucer went with a mission to Lombardy, he had left 
the care of his private interests in the hands of two friends, one 
of whom was John Gower. Chaucer had dedicated to Gower 
his " Troilus and Cressida," and had then joined to his friend's 
name a word of honor, as the "moral Gower," which cleaves 
to it still. Presently we come to a poem of Gower's from 
which we learn that this friendship remained unbroken to their 
later da}'s. 

In 1389 King Richard had taken the government into his own 
hands, and, living in fear of his people, made some effort 
to rule also himself. For a few following years, men who, like 



102 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

Gower, had their country's welfare at heart, credited the king 
with good intentions, and gave him k^ally their friendship. In 
1393, John Gower, rowing to town from his house in Kent or 
Essex by the river highway, then commonly used as the great 
London road, met the king's barge. At the invitation of 
Richard — who was at that time twenty-six years old, while 
the poet's age was about sixty-six — Gower left his boat, and 
conversed with the king, who, in the course of conversation, 
asked him to write a new book for himself to read. Gower 
had been suffering from a long illness, and still was ill : but he 
undertook to write such a book in English for King Richard, 
to whom his allegiance and heart's obedience were due; and 
he resolved to write so that his words might be as wisdom to 
the wise, and recreation to the idle. Thus Gower began his 
" Confessio Amantis " ("Confession of a Lover") at a time 
when his friend Chaucer was at work upon "The Canterbury 
Tales;" and thus each poet in his latter years was following 
the example which had been set by Boccaccio in his ' ' Decam- 
eron," except that they used verse instead of prose in string- 
ing a chain of tales on a slight thread of story. But, as to the 
spirit of their work, the English poets differ much from the 
Italian. 

In the "Confessio Amantis," Gower's notion of a poem that should 
be 

" Wisdom to the wise, 
And play to them that list to play," 

was as serious as Hampole's "Pricke of Conscience." He began by tell- 
ing its origin, and dedicating it to the king. But in a revision of his 
book, made when Richard had cast down the hope of those who credited 
him, for a few years after 1389, with the desire to do his duty, Gower 
expunged his words of allegiance; said, in place of them, "What shall 
befall here afterward God wot! " and transferred the dedication to Henry 
of Lancaster. For the fashionable device of his poem, Gower, infirm 
and elderly, cared little. To the best of his power he used it as a sort 
of earthwork, from behind which he set himself the task of digging and 
springing a mine under each of the seven deadly sins. There were 
eight books, with a prologue. The prologue repeated briefly the cry of 
the " Vox Clamantis." The eight books were, one for each of the seven 
deadly sins, with one interpolated book, seventh in the series, which 
rhymed into English a digest of the " Secretum Secretorum." This was 
a summary of philosophical and political doctrine wrongly supposed in 



To A.D. 1400.] GOWER. 103 

the Middle Ages to contain the pith of Aristotle's teaching, as drawn 
out by himself for the use of Alexander. The second part of it, " De 
Regimine Principum," 011 the duties of kings, or " Governail of Princes" 
as the English writers called it, enabled Gower to edify the un teachable 
Richard with much argument upon the state and duties of a king. 

Near tbe end of this poem the aged poet, having received absolution 
from his confessor, the priest of Nature, was dismissed from the court 
of Venus, with advice from her to go "where moral virtue dwelleth." 
He was to take also a message from Venus to her disciple and poet 
Chaucer, who, in the flower of his youth, made ditties and glad songs, 
wherewith, said Venus, 

"The land fulfilled is over all; 
Whereof to him in special, 
Above all others, I am most hold; 
Forthi now in his daie's old, 
Thou shalt him telle this message : " 

that he was to crown his work by making his Testament of Love as 
Grower had made his shrift, so that her court might record it. Here it 
is quite evident that Gower, speaking of himself as one old man, turns 
with playful compliment to his friend Chaucer as another. 

About the year 1396, Gower, being not far from seventy 
years of age, and having lost all confidence in the character of 
King Richard II., withdrew from the outer life of the world. 
The Priory of St. Mary Overies, on the Southwark side of 
London Bridge (of which the chapel is now represented b}' the 
Parish Church of St. Saviour) , was being rebuilt in the reigns 
of Richard II. and Hemy IV. The masons were still at their 
work, when John Gower, who was the most liberal contributor 
towards the cost of rebuilding, established lodgings and a 
chapel of his own in the new priory, and withdrew from the 
world to spend his last years peacefully, a clerk among clerks, 
within shadow of the church of which he was an honored bene- 
factor. Gower 's faith in Richard was gone ; and the public 
events which immediately followed his retirement caused the 
old poet to write in Latin leonine hexameter his ' ' Tripartite 
Chronicle." This is the sequel to his " Vox Clamantis," since 
it tells the issue of the misgovernment against which that 
earlier work had been a note of warning. The " Chronicle " 
was called " Tripartite," because it told the stoiy of Richard's 
ruin in three parts, of which the first, said Gower, related hu- 
man work, the second hellish work, the third a work in Christ. 



104 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

Human work was the control of Richard by his uncle Glouces- 
ter when the commission of regency was established ; hellish 
work was the coup d'etat; the work in Christ was the conse- 
quent dethronement of King Richard . 

On the accession of Hemy IV., John Gower, who needed no 
money, received from the new king recognition of his hearty 
sympathy with what he looked upon as Christ's work in the 
overthrow of tyranny. In the 3'ear of Chaucer's death, Gower 
became blind. But he lived on in the priory till 1408 ; and after 
his death in that 3'ear, considering his liberal aid to their build- 
ing-works, his brethren there honored his memory with a painted 
window and a tomb, upon which his effigy is still to be seen 
lying, adorned with the Lancastrian collar of SS, with an ap- 
pended badge of the swan. This was the valued gift of the 
new king. When, in his blindness, his hand touched it, the aged 
moralist might now and then recall the past, and blend hope for 
the future with abiding faith that " often where the people cries, 
there is God." 

2. If John Gower was the poet of the wealth}' and cultivated 
classes in England during the latter half of the fourteenth 
century, William Langland was essentially the poet of the 
common people. He was probably born in Oxfordshire, and 
not earlier than 1332. The opening of his famous poem, " The 
Vision of Piers Ploughman," leads us to infer that William 
Langland was bred to the church, and was attached at one 
time to the monastery of Great Malvern. But he married, and 
seems only to have performed minor offices of the church. He 
came to London, for in the latest continuation of the poem he 
speaks of himself as living poorly in Cornhill by the perform- 
ance of small" clerical duties. If Langland was the author of 
a poem on the "Deposition of Richard II.," which has been 
not unreasonably ascribed to him, he was alive in 1399. 

"The Vision of Piers Ploughman" speaks the mind of the 
main body of the English people of its time. /It is a vision of 
Christ seen through the clouds of humanity, — a spiritual picture 
of the labor to maintain right, and uphold the life spent upon 
duty done for love of God. The poem is in the mystical num- 
ber of nine drearns, and, in its completest form, twenty-three 



To A.D. 1400.] LANGLAND. 105 

" passus," or cantos. Without rhyme, unless by accident, and 
with alliteration in First English manner, a national poet of 
vivid imagination has here fastened on the courtly taste for 
long allegorical dreams, and speaks \>y it to the humblest in 
a well-sustained allegoiy, often of great subtlet}', alwa}'s em- 
boclving the purest aspirations. Everywhere, too, it gives flesh 
and blood to its abstractions b}' the most vigorous directness of 
familiar detail ; so that every truth might, if possible, go home, 
even by the cold hearthstone of the hungriest and most deso- 
late of the poor, to whom its words of a wise S3'mpathy were 
recited. 

Langland dreamed of a fair field full of folk, — the world and its peo- 
ple, — among whom the maid Meed (worldly reward) was about to be 
wedded to Falsehood. Theology forbade the marriage, and the question 
of it was tried before the king in London. The allegory is the first of 
the sequence of dreams forming the whole vision, rich in lively pictur- 
ing of the conditions of men in the world, and plain of speech as to the 
duties of kings. 

The poet slept again, and saw in his second dream again the fair field 
full of folk, to whom now Reason was preaching that the pestilence and 
the south-west wind on Saturday at even came to warn them of their 
sin and pride. After a time, Repentance prayed ; and then Hope blew a 
horn, at which the saints in heaven sang, and a thousand men cried up 
to Christ and his pure mother that they might know the way to Truth. 
They inquired of a pilgrim fresh from Sinai, who said that he had never 
heard such a saint asked after. Then suddenly a Ploughman put forth 
his head and said that he knew Truth as naturally as a clerk his books. 
Piers Ploughman is thus first introduced in the poem as type of the poor 
and simple to whom the things of God are revealed, and gradually, 
within fifty lines, passes into the Christ who came as one of low es- 
tate to guide the erring world. 

In the course of this long poem are discussed, in vivid and often in 
satirical forms, all those topics that then stirred the hearts and brains 
of the English people, especially of the lowly classes; and towards the 
end of it, it is shown that Grace gave to Piers the Ploughman on earth a 
team of four oxen, which were the four evangelists, and four stots, 
Austin, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome, who, with two harrows, an old 
and a new (Testament), followed Piers' s plough. And Grace gave the 
seed that should be sown: the spirits of prudence, and of temperance, 
and of fortitude, and of justice. Thus ended the spiritual search; but 
over the heavenly vision of Piers Ploughman there again rolled the dark 
mists of earth. Piers was attacked by Pride. Conscience counselled 
his followers to defend themselves in the Castle of Unity (the church). 



106 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

The Pope, whom "God amend," plundered the church. The king 
claimed all he could take. 

In the last dream, the ninth, Antichrist came in a man's form to 
waste the crop of Truth. Within the Castle of Unity Flattery got 
entrance as a physician. Thus Conscience was ousted, saying, 

" Now kynde me avenge, 
And send me hap and heele, 
Till I have Piers the Ploughman." 

So, with the object of his search yet unattained, through the turmoil 
and disaster of those days of Richard II., in which the poem was com- 
pleted, the poet sent his last thought heavenward, and built his last hope 
for the world upon a search for Christ. 

The power" of Langland's poem is incidentally proved by the imita- 
tions of its form or title that have appeared since then. One of these is 
a poem of 850 lines, in the measure and outward manner of " The Vision 
of Piers Ploughman," called "Piers Ploughman's Crede," and levelled 
with much bitterness of feeling against all orders of friars. In this 
poem an ignorant man who had learned his Paternoster and Ave Mary 
wished to be taught his creed, and, after seeking knowledge in vain of 
the friars, met with a common ploughman, who explained to him that 
the friars, although their orders were founded by good men, had become 
children of the devil, reminded him how they persecuted Wiclif, and him- 
self gave the instruction sought. The ploughman in the poem was simply 
a poor rustic. There was no high allegory, as in the "Vision," and the 
antagonism to church corruption was that of a lower and a harsher 
mind. The poem was written in or about the year 1394, and the author 
of it seems to have been the author of " The Ploughman's Tale." 

3. While these great poets of South Britain were thus put- 
ting their earnestness and their mirth into song, in North 
Britain was another poet of kindred spirit, John Barbour, 
Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who uttered in memorable verse the 
best thought and the noblest passion of the Scottish people. 

He was born, perhaps in 1316, possibly as late as 1330 ; was 
made Archdeacon of Aberdeen in 1357, and so remained until 
his death in 1396. He wrote " A History of Scottish Kings," 
which is lost ; also many thousand lines of " Lives of Saints,'-' 
which have been lately found ; but his most important work is 
"Bruce," a romance in rlryming verse of more than 13,000 
lines. In this poem, the hero, Robert Bruce, who had died 
less than fifty years before Barbour sang, came to life again as 
a knightly hero, able to defend a pass against three hundred 
men of Galloway ; and the true course of his story was followed 



To A.D. 1400.] MANDEVILLE. 107 

faithfully, though rather with the freedom of a poet than the 
literalness of a chronicler. The poem as a whole represented 
the bright spirit of liberty maintained by that Scottish war of 
independence (A.D. 1294-1324) which had produced in the 
da} T s of Edward I. a Wallace, in the days of Edward II. a 
Bruce, and in the days of Edward III. a poet in John Barbour, 
who, as he turned. Bruce into a hero of romance, wrote with 
full heart : 

"Ah, Freedom is a noble thing! 

Freedom makes man to have liking ; 

Freedom all solace to man gives : 

He lives at ease that freely lives." 

4. Passing to the prose-writers, we encounter, first, Sir John 
Mandeville. This man represented in the reign of Edward 
III. the English spirit of adventure, and was doubtless the 
oldest of all the writers, in prose or verse, whom we are 
grouping around the splendid name of Chaucer. He was born 
at St. Albans, about 1300 ; and it was in the reign of Edward 
II., on Michaelmas Da} r , 1322, that he set out upon his travels. 
Five years later, when Edward III. became king, Sir John 
Mandeville was still abroad. He tells us that he visited Tar- 
taiy, Persia, Armenia, Libj'a, Chaldsea, and a great part of 
Ethiopia, Amazonia, India the Less and the Greater, and isles 
that are about India. For more than thirty years he had been 
absent, when he came home, as he said, in spite of himself, to 
rest ; " for rheumatic gouts that distress me fix the end of my 
labor against nry will (God knoweth)." On his way home he 
showed to the Pope what he had written in French about the 
marvels and customs he had seen or heard of. The Pope 
showed the book to his council, and it was approved. After 
his return home, his book was translated, by writers now 
unknown, from the French into English and into Latin ; and, 
especially in its English version, it reached a popularity during 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries unsurpassed by any other 
work of those times. It was first published in 1356, and was 
dedicated to Edward III. , at a time when Chaucer, at court, had 
perhaps done little more than translate ' ' Le Roman de la 
Rose," and write his "Court of Love;" when Gower might 



108 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350 

have written a balade or two ; and Wiclif and Langland, one at 
Oxford, and the other possibly at Malvern, were two young and 
earnest men, with the chief labors of their lives before them. 

Mandevilie's book was planned with distinct reference to the 
wants of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and contrived to subordinate 
accounts of the remotest travel to the form of what we might 
call a traveller's guide to Jerusalem by four routes, with a 
handbook to the holy places. The wonderful things told do 
not in themselves convict Mandeville of any wilful untruth. 
He tells of what was seen by him as matter of knowledge ; in 
the miracles narrated to him he put faith ; and all other marvels 
of which he heard he tells only as matter of hearsay. Mande- 
ville died at Liege, in 1371. 

5. John "Wiclif, born in Yorkshire about 1324, was in 1361 
master of Balliol College, Oxford, and was in that year pre- 
sented b} r his college to the Tectory of Fj^lingham, in Lincoln- 
shire. Soon afterwards he resigned his mastership, and went 
to reside on his living. He was presently made doctor of 
divinity. He had a quick mind in a spare, frail body ; and at 
the time when "William Langland was writing in like spirit his 
" Vision of Piers Ploughman," Wiclif was showing his pure de- 
sire to restore a spiritual church. John of Gaunt was then 
ready, as head of the feudal party at court, to humble the pride 
of the prelates who claimed temporal power. He welcomed, 
therefore, the most innocent and self-deirying Wiclif as a fellow- 
combatant ; and when, in 1376, at the close of the reign of 
Edward III., Wiclif was cited as a heretic to appear at St. 
Paul's before the appointed ecclesiastical judges, he went thith- 
er with John of Gaunt, and Percy, the Earl Marshal of Eng- 
land, as supporters. This led to a brawl. The populace 
judged Wiclif by his companions, and saw in him one of the 
people's enemies. Yet he was already quietly engaged with 
others upon that "Translation of the Bible" which was not 
completed until after the death of Edward III. As nothing 
came of the proceedings at St. Paul's, the monks, who also 
looked on Wiclif as their enemy, obtained the Pope's injunction 
to the prelates and the university to renew process against him ; 
but before the Pope's bulls could reach England Edward III. 



To A.D. 1400.] TREVISA. 109 

was dead, and the next following changes were in Wiclif' s 
favor. 

In the year 1360 the English people had in their own current 
language no part of the Bible bnt the Psalter. Twent} T years 
afterwards, in 1380, the devoted labor of Wiclif and his fellow- 
workers had produced a complete English Bible, including the 
Apocrypha. Wiclif began with comments on the Gospels, and 
in the prologue to the Gospel by Matthew strongly urged that 
the whole Scripture ought to be translated for the use of the 
laity. It was while finishing his translation, that Wiclif, whose 
chief work had been a Latin one, " De Dominio Divino," be- 
gan to forsake the use of Latin, and wrote English tracts. In 
1381 he issued a paper of twelve propositions against transub- 
stantiation. In 1382 the Dominicans, or Black Friars, who 
were the custodians of orthodoxy, had in their house at London 
a council at which twenty-four conclusions selected from Wiclif's 
writings were condemned. He was banished from the universi- 
ty. In 1384 Wiclif was summoned to appear before the Pope ; 
but he was then dying from paralysis, and on the last da}* of 
that year he obeyed his summons to appear before a higher 
judgment-seat. 

6. John Trevisa was a Cornishman, educated at Oxford, 
who became vicar of Berkele}-, in Gloucestershire, and chap- 
lain to Thomas, fourth Lord Berkeley. Afterwards he was 
canon of the collegiate church of Westbury. As a clerg3*man 
he was no friend to the monks. In the course of his life he 
had been to Germany and Italy ; but he spent most of his daj T s 
in Gloucestershire, where he occupied his leisure in translation 
of useful books out of Latin into his mother-tongue. He is 
said to have died in 1412. His most important work was his 
" Translation of Higden's Po^'chronicon," completed in 1387, 
and made especially for his patron, Lord Berkeley. It was 
prefaced by Trevisa's own "Dialogue on Translation between 
a Lord and a Clerk ; " that is to say, his patron and himself. 
Moreover, Trevisa, who was a shrewd man, added a few short 
explanator}* notes to his translation of the " Polychronicon ; " 
and these notes, together with the "Dialogue," are of special 



110 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1350. 

interest as very primitive examples of original prose in Early 
Modern English. 

7. A writer of this period, Ralph Strode, has an undying name only 
because Chaucer has mentioned him. There is reason to think that 
he taught one of Chaucer's sons. He was a Dominican of Jedburgh 
Abbey, who had sought knowledge in France, Germany, and Italy, had 
visited the Holy Land, and was in highest credit as a theologian and 
philosopher about the year 1370. He wrote verse also, both Latin and 
English. Some of his books have been printed in Germany, but none 
in England. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 



POETS. 



John Lydgate. 
Thomas Occleve. 
James I. of Scotland- 
Benedict Burgh. 
John Harding. 
Andrew of Wyntoun. 



Juliana Berners. 
Thomas Chestre. 
Blind Harry. 
Robert Henryson. 
Authors of Ballads. 



PROSE-WRITERS, 



Reginald Pecock. 
Sir John Fortescue. 
William Caxton. 



Sir Thomas Malory. 
John Tiptoft. 
Anthony Woodville. 



CHAPTER III. 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: POETS. 

1. Intellectual Character of the Fifteenth Century. — 2. Development of the Eng- 
lish Language and of English Style; Reserved Energies. — 3. John Lydgatc.— 
4. Thomas Occleve. — 6. James I. of Scotland. — 6. Minor Poets. — 7. Ballads. 

1. It is usual for literaiy historians to speak of the fifteenth 
century as a dismal one in the annals of English letters, — as an 
epoch of intellectual relapse and of literaiy barrenness. Even 
beyond the borders of England there was, during this period, a 
dearth of important literary works : according to Hallam, no 
great literaiy masterpiece was produced in the fifteenth century 
anywhere in Europe. Certainly, in England, during all that 
time, there was no literaiy genius of the highest order, such as 
the fourteenth centuiy had in Chaucer, such as the sixteenth 
century had in Spenser and in Shakespeare. 

In studying the English literature of the fifteenth centuiy, it 
will be best for us, first, to group together the principal facts in 
the outward and inward life of that centuiy, that helped or hin- 
dered the progress of literature. 

(«) It was in England a centuiy of turbulence ; of popular 
convulsion ; of bloody strife between rival families of the ro} T al- 
ty and nobility. Not a king sat on the throne whose right to 
sit there was not in dispute. It was the centuiy of the insur- 
rection of Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses. 

(b) The claim of the King of England to the crown of France 
kept both countries, during the first half of the centuiy, in a 
state of constant war, or of the expectation of war. 

(c) Greater restraints were put upon the action of the human 
mind than had ever before been done in England. In 1401 an 
English statute was confirmed, by which it was settled that 
every sheriff in taking the oath of his office must swear to re- 
dress all errors and heresies ; and also that heretics might be 

113 



114 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400 

dealt with at their own discretion, provided alwa} r s that the pro- 
ceedings against any heretic should be publicly and judicially 
ended within three months. In that very year, William Saw- 
tree, the first English martyr for heresy, was burned alive in 
Smithfield ; and the light of such fires was kept up in England 
for more than a century. 

(d) In spite of such perils, bitter theological controversy 
raged in England, diverting many minds from the temper that 
is favorable to literary studies, yet educating many minds to 
think keenly on the most difficult problems. 

(e) It was in this century that the future influence of every 
wise thought was enlarged by the invention of printing, made 
by John Gutenberg in 1438, and introduced into England by 
William Caxton about 1475. 

(/) For a hundred years and more before the fifteenth cen- 
tury, the impulse had been growing in Europe, to turn away 
from the tasteless mass of mediaeval literature to the sinidy of 
the Roman and Greek classics. This impulse was advancing 
under great disadvantages, the principal one being the lack of 
Greek books and of Greek teachers. In 1453, about the time 
that the art of printing was perfected by Gutenberg, Constan- 
tinople, then a vast Greek city, was captured by the Turks ; 
and multitudes of the finest Greek scholars, carrying with them 
copies of the best Greek classics, were turned adrift upon 
Western Europe to gain a livelihood by teaching Greek. They 
and their books were everywhere welcomed with unspeakable 
homage ; and the push they gave to the revival of ancient learn- 
ing can hardly be overstated. England, as the westernmost 
barrier of Europe, was of course the last to be reached by this 
new light shining out of the East ; but it was reached in due 
time, and that, too, before the end of the fifteenth century. 

(g) Two other great events occurred in that period, which 
greatly stimulated mental activity and widened the range of 
human thought in all European countries, and especially in 
England : these events were the rounding of the Cape of Good 
Hope in 1486, and the discovery of America in 1492. 

(h) During the fifteenth century, extraordinary zeal was 
shown in England for the foundation and improvement of 



To A.D. 1500.] PROGRESS W ENGLISH STYLE. 115 

colleges. Then it was, that, at Oxford, Lincoln College was 
founded, besides All Souls, and Magdalene ; then it was that at 
Cambridge was erected a building for a library and divinity 
school, — "the most magnificent structure of which the uni- 
versit}- 3-et had to boast ; ' ' then it was that Eton College was 
founded ; and in Scotland, the first of her universities, that of 
St. Andrews, and the second, that of Glasgow. 

(1) There were likewise then in England several influential 
noblemen and statesmen who loved letters, were themselves 
considerable scholars, and by founding libraries, protecting au- 
thors, and themselves becoming authors, at once gave a new 
dignity to scholarly pursuits, and a new impulse to English lit- 
erature. Such were John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester; Duke 
Humphrey ; Earl Rivers ; and Sir John Fortescue. 

2. Besides these facts bearing in a general and sometimes 
indirect way upon the progress of English literature in the fif- 
teenth century, we ought to take note of the great progress 
then made, not only in the literary use of English in preference 
to Latin and French, but especially in the quality of the Eng- 
lish that was then used. The language underwent during that 
century a constant and rapid amelioration ; it grew in smooth- 
ness, copiousness, and expressiveness. It is the opinion of 
George P. Marsh, that, in ecclesiastical prose, the fifteenth cen- 
tury " made a considerable advance upon Wiclif in vocabulary, 
and more especially in the logical structure of period ; ' ' and 
that the two most eminent poets of the fifteenth centur} r , Lyd- 
gate and King James I., " exhibit . . . increased affluence and 
polish of diction as compared with Chaucer." Indeed, so rapid 
were the improvements which then went forward in our lan- 
guage, that the writings of the latter part of the fourteenth cen- 
tury seemed to readers in the latter part of the fifteenth century 
to be marred by uncouth and obsolete words. For instance, 
William Caxton printed in 1482 that English translation of 
Higden's " Poly chroni con " which had been finished by John 
Trevisa in 1387 ; but in his preface, Caxton thought it necessary 
to insert this explanation: " I, William Caxton, a simple per- 
son, have endeavored me to write, first over, all the said book 
of ' Polychronicon,' and somewhat have changed the rude and 



116 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400 

old English, that is to wit, certain words which in these da} T s be 
neither used ne understood." The space between Trevisa and 
Caxton was no greater than that between Cowper or Burke, and 
writers of the present day ; yet in the former case the language 
had so rapidly developed that some of the diction of Trevisa 
seemed "rude" to Caxton, and to be in his days "neither 
used ne understood." 

If the fifteenth century did not add to our literature a single 
masterpiece, at least it fed with its very mists the great streams 
of the future. Scattered personal interest sped over the scene 
as a wild mass of clouds, and rolled at times into a tempest to 
which mists of darkness seemed to be reserved forever. But 
in the clods of the earth — among its unconsidered people — ■ 
there lay forces to which even mist and storm gave energy ; 
and still over all there shone the light of Him whose strength 
is in the clouds. The vigor of a nation lies, at all times, in the 
character and action of the common body of its people. The 
highest genius, which implies good sense, true insight, and 
quick s} T mpathy, must draw its sustenance from the surround- 
ing world of ma.11 and nature. When it mistakes, if it ever can 
mistake, the conventional life of a court for the soul of a nation, 
seeking to strike root down into that only and draw support 
from that, it must be as good seed fallen among stones. When 
it mistakes, if it ever can mistake, the mere dust of the high- 
road, the day's fashions blown about by every wind, for source 
of life, it dies under the feet of the next-comer. The good soil 
is eveiywhere in the minds of men. Culture may be confined 
to a few patches, but everywhere in the common ground lies 
that of which fruit shall come. 

3. Let us study, first, the poets of this century, and after- 
ward the prose-writers. Of poets, there were only three of much 
mark, — John Lydgate, Thomas Occleve, and James I. of Scot- 
land. In the latter part of the century, there arose two other 
prominent poets, — John Skelton and William Dunbar ; but their 
principal activity lay in the sixteenth century, and we shall 
defer our account of them until we come to deal with the six- 
teenth century. 

The three poets first named were alike in this, that they 



T0A.D.1500.] LYDGATE. 117 

avowed themselves as the poetic children of Chaucer, and were 
content to be merely his imitators. This, of course, deprives 
them of all claim to be regarded as original or independent 
forces in our literature. 

John Lydgate was born not later than 1370, at the village 
of Lydgate, in Suffolk. In the Benedictine monasteiy of Bury 
St. Edmunds he was ordained subcleacon in 1389, deacon in 
1393, and priest in 1397. After studying at Oxford, Paris, 
and Padua, he opened a school of rhetoric at his monasteiy of 
Buiy St. Edmunds, where Dan (that is Dominus) John Lyd- 
gate, the monk of Buiy, became a famous teacher of literature 
and the art of versifying. He was well read in ancient lore ; 
mathematician also, and astronomer, as well as orator and poet ; 
a bright, pleasant, and earnest man, who wrote clear fluent 
verse in airy style then reputable, but who was most apt at the 
telling of such moral stories as his public liked. He preferred 
to take his heroes and heroines out of the Maiiyrolog}', and 
he could write pleasantly to order for the library of any monas- 
teiy the legend of its patron saint. Since he wrote so much 
(there are not less than two hundred and fifty works bearing 
his name), and almost alwa}~s as a stoiy-teller, he found many 
readers, and his rhyming supplied some of the favorite tales of 
his time. L}Tlgate wrote for Henry V. "The Life of Our 
Lady ; " he sang the tale of St. Alban, the English proto-mar- 
tyr, of his own St. Edmund, and of many a saint more. 
He could catch the strain of popular song, and satirize the 
licking up of money which leaves the poor man hopeless of 
justice, in his "London Lickpenny," whereof the measure is 
enlivened with the street-cries of his time. He could write 
morality in the old court allegorical st}de ; he could kneel at 
the foot of the cross, and offer to his God the sacrifice of a true 
outburst of such song as there was in him. John Lydgate was 
not a poet of great genius, but he was a man with music in his 
life. He was full of a harmony of something more than words, 
not more diffuse than his age liked him to be, and therefore, 
with good reason, popular and honored among English readers 
in the fifteenth century. 

He is to be remembered for three great poems which con- 



118 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1400 

stitute his chief works. First is his "Falls of Princes," a 
long poem in Chancer' s seven-lined stanza, founded upon Boc- 
caccio's Latin prose-work in nine books, " De Casibus Illus- 
triuni Virorum ; " but L}-dgate said that he followed Boccaccio 
through the version of a Frenchman, Laurent, that is Laurent 
de Premierfait, who translated also the "Decameron" for 
Jeanne, Queen of Navarre. Lj'dgate interspersed his work 
with occasional prologues and balades of his own, while he 
retold the stories, not as a mere rhyming translator, but as a 
man who had an honest gift of song and felt their poetry. 
There passes through the reader's mind a funeral pomp of men 
who have been carried high on Fortune's wheel, and then been 
bruised to death by its descending stroke. The poem warns 
the might}' to be humble, and the lowly to be well content. 

"The Story of Thebes" is told by Lydgate as another 
" Canterbury Tale." After a sickness he went in a black 
cope, "on palfrey slender, long, and lean," with rust}^ bridle, 
and his man before him canning an empty pack, to the shrine 
at Canterbury, and b} T accident put up there at the inn where 
Chaucer's pilgrims were assembled. There he saw the host of 
the Tabard, who thought him lean for a monk, prescribed 
nut-brown ale after supper, with anise, cumin, or coriander- 
seed at bedtime. But the best medicine was cheerful com- 
pany. So Dan John supped with the pilgrims, went home 
with them next day, and helped to amuse them with the story 
of the "Thebaic!" of Statins, as it had been manipulated by 
the romancers of the middle ages. 

L3'dgate's " Troy Book " is a metrical version from a French 
translation of the " Historia Trojana" of Guido della Colonna, 
a Sicilian poet and law}-er of Messina, who came to England 
in 1287 with Edward I. 

4. Thomas Occleve, the other chief poet of the genera- 
tion after Chaucer, was of the same age as Lydgate. and. like 
Lydgate, about thirt}' years old when Chaucer died. He was a 
Londoner, and knew Chaucer ; evidently he refers to a personal 
relation between them when he speaks of himself as Chaucer's 
disciple. In his earlier } T ears he lived in the Strand, at Ches- 
ter's Inn, one of the buildings pulled down for the site of 



To A.D. 1500.] JAMES I. 119 

Somerset House. He sa}'s that his life was ill regulated in 
his youth, but sa} T s this in a poem designed for moral counsel 
to 3*oung men — " La Male Regie de T. Hoccleve " — of which 
the purpose doubtless led to a half-artistic exaggeration of 
self-censure. We know Occleve tolerably well through his 
chief poem ; for the long original introduction to his version of 
" De Regimine Principum," or "The Governail of Princes," 
consists wholly of moral reflections on the manners of his time, 
interspersed with references to his own position in a govern- 
ment office as clerk of the privy seal. He was married, had a 
household to provide for, and could not get his salaiy paid, or 
an annuity for life of twenty marks which had been nominal^ 
granted him. Therefore he took a melancholy morning walk 
and met an old man, who asked what was his trouble. A lively 
dialogue followed on that, giving occasion for earnest words 
upon all evils of the time, from the self-seeking churchmen to 
the length of side sleeves. The old man's advice was that 
Occleve should write to the prince something in English, but 
w% write to him no thing that sowneth to vice," and show him- 
self to be a man who deserved payment of arrears of salary. 
In obedience to this counsel, he translated for Heniy V. the 
book u De Regimine Principum," digested into practical coun- 
sel, not without reminder of the unpaid annuity, and towards 
the end with deprecation of the wars between the kings of 
France and England, and an invocation of peace for the land. 
" Let Christian kings," he sa} r s, " war only on the enemies of 
Christ." 

Were the}' the men accused of heresy? Occleve — earnest 
and liberal in mairy things, and in this lighter poem, written in 
English and in Chaucer's stanza, seeking to find out the wrong 
and get it undone, with as much earnestness as Gower in his 
"Vox Clamantis," while he pointed to the corruption of the 
clergy — was, like Gower, an orthodox maintainer of church 
doctrine. We find, therefore, that he assented to the new en- 
deavor to save, as it was thought, man}' from the everlasting 
lire by giving some to be burned publicly in this world. 

5. James I. of Scotland was considerably younger than 
the two poets with whom his name is here associated ; he was 



120 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400 

born in 1394. In 1405, being a boy of eleven, he set out upon 
a voyage to France, whither he was being sent for education. 
Upon this voyage he was captured by an English armed ship, 
and taken as a prisoner to Windsor Castle. In the following 
year, his father, King Robert III., died, and the lad became 
nominal king of Scotland. But James's uncle, the unscrupu- 
lous Duke of Albany, had long held all power in Scotland in 
his own hands ; and, having a son of his own to succeed him, 
he willingly suffered the boy-king to remain a prisoner in the 
hands of the English, where he continued for nineteen years. 
In many respects, this proved a great blessing to James. He 
received a careful and refined education at the English court ; 
was well educated in English laws and customs ; and was to be 
released when further bound b}^ marriage with a lady of the 
royal family of England. Nature assisted Henry's polic} r , for 
a true affection sprang up between King James and the Lady 
Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, niece to 
King Henry IV., and first cousin to Henry V. The love was 
celebrated in a poem known as "The King's Quair," that is, 
" The King's Little Book." This is a graceful piece of court 
poetry, inspired by love and a stud}' of Chaucer, and written 
in Chaucer's own seven-lined stanza, which long remained a 
favorite with his successors, and has been called rhyme royal, 
because this particular disciple used it. An epilogue, or "ex- 
cusation of the author," represents James, king though he be, 
acknowledging his "masters" in three poets, whose roj'alty 
was more than the inheritance of worldly rank, — Gower and 
Chaucer, and next to these John L} r dgate, who, when the 
young king wrote his poem, was first in repute among men of 
the generation after Chaucer. 

In 1424, King James was permitted to go home to Scotland. 
His love was first crowned by marriage to Jane Beaufort, in 
royal state ; and then he was crowned at Scone, King of Scot- 
land. He sought to maintain peace and order in his kingdom ; 
endeavored to bring law and justice within reach of the poor ; 
regulated weights and measures ; established a survey of property 
with a view to justice in taxation ; and made careful inquiry 
into titles. He tried to suppress with a strong hand the violence 



To A.D. 1500.] BLIXD HARRY. 121 

of faction. But the enlarged liberties of the people pressed on 
the feudal rights of the nobles. Many a rough-handed chief 
looked also with concern at the inquny into titles. Sir Robert 
Graham, who had denounced the king as a tyrant for his en- 
croachment on the nobles, at last broke in upon him with three 
hundred Highlanders, at Christmas time in 1436, caught him 
unarmed, and killed him. He defended himself bravely, and 
his wife, Jane, who sought to shelter him, was wounded in the 
struggle. He had written of her truly in "The King's 
Quair:" 

" And thus this floure . . . 
So hertly has unto my help attendit, 
That from the deth hir man sche has defendit." 

Some writers ascribe to James I. of Scotland two humorous 
old Scottish poems describing the rough holida3'-life of the 
people. They are called " Peeblis to the Play," and " Christis 
Kirk of the Grene." If they were really his, he must have had 
a range of power that would place him first among the poets of 
his time. 

6. Benedict Burgh, Archdeacon of Colchester, who died in 
1483, translated into English verse Cato's " Morals ; " and is 
said, also, to have finished a metrical version, left incomplete 
by Lydgate, of "De Regimine Principum." John Harding 
was born in 1378 ; entered as a lad the service of Sir Henry 
Perc}*, known as Hotspur, and fought under him at Homildon ; 
was a fighter in the battle of Agincourt ; was constable of one 
of the castles of Sir Robert Umfraville ; and wrote an English 
" Chronicle " in rhyme. So, also, Andrew of Wyntoun, a 
regular canon of St. Andrews, wrote " The Oryginale Cronj'kil 
of Scotland," in nine books of octosyllabic rlrymed verses. 
Dame Juliana Berners, lad}- prioress of the nunnery of 
Sopwell, near St. Albans, who was living in 1460, wrote in 
English verse a "Book of Hunting," and in English prose 
" The Art of Hawking " and " The Laws of Arms." 

Thomas Chestre, who wrote for the minstrels in the reign 
of Henry VI., Englished " The Lay of Sir Launfal ; " but the 
most famous minstrel of this time was a Scottish rustic, blind 
from birth, known as Henry the Minstrel, or Blind Harry, 



122 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400 

who obtained food and clothing b} T recitation of stories before 
men of the highest rank. He was one of an order of men who 
sang or chanted tales to the harp, in verses often of their own 
composing, enlivened with mimicry and action. Blind Harry, 
who understood Latin and French, produced a long poem on his 
nation's hero, " Wallace," in or about the }~ear 1461. He was 
the first who followed Chaucer in use of the heroic couplet ; and 
he calls his poem a chronicle derived chiefly from the Latin of 
John Blair, who had been Wallace's school-fellow. 

During the latter part of the fifteenth century, English poetical 
literature was most vigorous in the north. Besides Blind Harry 
and William Dunbar and a number of other Scottish singers 
who are named \>y Dunbar in his "Lament for the Makers," 
was Robert Henryson, schoolmaster of Dunfermline, who 
turned into Chaucer's stanza " The Moral Fables of iEsop the 
Phiwgian." There are thirteen fables here versified, including 
one that has once or twice since taken a place of note in litera- 
ture, the fable of " The Town and Country Mouse," or, as 
Henryson had it, " The Taill of the Uponlandis Mous and the 
Burges Mous."- Another fable, of " The Dog, the Wolf, and 
the Sheep," is treated as an exposure of the abuses in procedure 
of the ecclesiastical courts. Hemyson wrote a prologue to the 
collection, and another to the fable of "The Lion and the 
Mouse," which represents himself wandering into a wood on a 
June morning, sleeping under a hawthorn, and visited in dream 
hx " Maister Esope, poet laureate," who says that he is of 
gentle blood, and that his "natal land is Rome withouttin nay." 
His original poems are "Testament of Cresseid," an impressive 
moral sequel to Chaucer's " Troilus and Cressida ; " " Robene 
and Makyne," our first pastoral poem, a work that has much 
natural and simple beaut}' ; and "The Blucly Serk," a good 
example both of his own religious earnestness and of the con- 
tinuance of the old taste for allegory. 

7. To the close of the fifteenth century belong also the earliest 
remaining traces of old English ballad literature. Wynken de 
Worde, Avho came to England with Caxton, and succeeded him 
in his printing-office, published a collection of Robin Hood bal- 
lads called " A Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode." There are 



To A.D. 1500.] ROBIN HOOD BALLADS. 123 

manuscripts also of the ballads of " Robin Hood and the Pot- 
ter " and " Robin Hood and the Monk," not older than the 
last years of the fifteenth centuiy. The ballads and tales that 
made Robin Hood representative of English popular feeling, not 
only ascribed to him courage and good-humor, and connected 
his name with the maintenance of archery for national defence, 
but also gave him Friar Tuck for chaplain, and blended in him 
religious feeling with resistance to oppression : 

" A good maner then had Robyn 
In londe where that he were, 
Every daye ere he wolde dine 
Three masses wolde he hear." 

His religion took especially the form, once dear to the people, 
of that worship of the Virgin which softened the harsh temper 
of mediaeval doctrine : 

" Eobyn loved onr dere lady; 
For doute of dedely synne, 
Wolde he never do company harme 
That ony woman was ynne." 

Maid Marian being added to his company, fidelity' to her would 
express English domestic feeling ; while the same battle against 
corrupt luxury in the church which had been represented for 
the educated courtier b}' Walter Map's Golias poetry was rudely 
expressed to the people in Robin Hood's injunction to his 

men: 

" These byshoppes and these archebyshoppes, 
Ye shall them bete and bynde." 

Robin Hood pitied the poor, and gave them part in the wealth 
stripped from those who lived in sensual excess. The chief 
representative of rich ecclesiastics in the Robin Hood ballads 
was the Abbot of St. Maiy's at York ; and the oppressions of 
secular authority were especially defied in the person of the 
Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood is said to have escaped all 
perils of his way of life, and to have been more than eighty 
years old when he went to his aunt, the prioress of Kirklees 
Nunnery, in Yorkshire, to be bled. She treacherous!}' let him 
bleed to death. As he was thus dying, Robin bethought him 
of his bugle-horn, and "blew out weak blasts three." Little 



124 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400. 

John came to his rescue, and asked leave to burn the nunnery ; 
but Robin said : 

" I never hurt fair maid in all my time, 
Nor at my end shall it be." 

He asked only to shoot an arrow from the window, that he 
might be buried where the arrow fell ; and so, sa} T s tradition, he 
was buried on a height that overlooks the valley of the Calder, 
at the distance of a might}' bow-shot from Kirklees. 

To the end of the fifteenth century belongs the charming 
dialogue-ballad of "The Nut Brown Maid;" likewise the 
famous ballads of "The Battle of Otterburn " and "Chevy 
Chase ; " although of the last two there remains no cop}' written 
so early as the fifteenth centuiy. The ballad literature to which 
these poems belong came into strong life in Europe during the 
thirteenth, and especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 
In the thirteenth century Spain uttered through national ballads 
the soul of freedom in her struggle against the Moors. Our- 
English ballads are akin to those which also among the Scandi- 
navians became a familiar social amusement of the people. 
They were recite"d by one of a company with animation and with 
varying expression, while the rest kept time, often with joined 
hands forming a circle, advancing, retiring, balancing, some- 
times remaining still, and, b}' various movements and gestures, 
followed the changes of emotion in the story. From this manner 
of enjoying them the ballads took their name. Ballare is a 
middle Latin word, meaning to incline to this side and that, 
with which the Italians associate their name for dancing, and 
we the word " ball " for the name of a dancing-party. There 
is some reason to think that educated gentlewomen were often 
the unknown writers of the ballads of England and the North 
of Europe. 



CHAPTER IV. 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: PROSE -WRITERS. 

1. Literary Use of Latin. — 2. Reginald Pecock.— 3. Sir John Fortescne. — 4. Wil- 
liam Caxton. — 5. Sir Thomas Malory. — 6. John Tiptoft ; Anthony Wood- 
ville. 

1. The literary use of Latin in preference to English, on the 
part of Englishmen, still continued in the fifteenth century, al- 
though the custom was steadily declining. 

Among English writers of Latin books may be mentioned Henry 
Knighton, who wrote a chronicle of events in England from King Edgar 
to Eichard II. ; John of Bromyard, who taught theology at Cambridge, 
and wrote, as his great work, "Summa Predicantium," an earnest, eru- 
dite, and interesting mass of mediaeval practical theology; William Lind- 
wood, a professor of theology at Oxford, who wrote " Constitutiones 
Provinciales Ecclesioe Anglicanae; " Thomas Xetter, who wrote numer- 
ous theological books, especially against Wiclif ; Sir John Fortescue, who 
wrote "De Laudibus Legum Angliae; " and Thomas TValsingham, whose 
principal work was a chronicle entitled "Historia Anglicana." 

2. The most important writers in English prose during the 
fifteenth century were these four, — Reginald Pecock, Sir John 
Fortescue, William Caxton, and Sir Thomas Malory. 

Reginald Pecock, probably a Welshman, was born towards 
the end of the fourteenth century, studied at Oxford, and was 
admitted to priest's orders in 1421. Being a man of great 
learning, piety, and eloquence, he soon became distinguished, 
especially for the defence of orthodoxy in arguments addressed 
to the reason. In 1444, he was made Bishop of St. Asaph ; and 
in 1449, Bishop of Chichester. About this time, he was engaged 
upon his principal work, — the most important English prose- 
work produced in the first half of the fifteenth century, — "The 
Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy." In this book, 
he attempted to justify six of the practices for which the clergy 

125 



126 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400 

incurred blame among the people : these were, the use of images ; 
the going on pilgrimages ; the holding of landed possessions by 
the clergy ; the various ranks of the hierarclrv ; the framing of 
church laws b} T papal and episcopal authority ; and the institu- 
tion of the religious orders. Upon the topics it discussed, the 
book was a repertory of fifteenth- centuiy argument. Although 
sincerely meant as a defence of the clerg} x against the Bible- 
men, this book greatly increased the hostility of his own order 
against him, — an hostility that had been growing for many 
years. His offence was that the whole subject was argued out 
in homely English for discussion by the English people ; for 
while Pecock exalted the Pope's supremac} T , he conceded to his 
opponents that in Scripture was the only rule of faith, and urged 
that doctrine should be proved therefrom b} T reason. This, 
however, he did while opposing the demand of the Lollards — 
Puritans of the fifteenth centuiy — for authority of Scripture in 
less important matters of usage, lay or clerical. There could be 
no real conflict between reason and Scripture, Pecock taught ; 
and the clergy, he said, shall be condemned at the last da}' " if 
by clear wit they draw not men into consent of true faith other- 
wise than hy fire', sword, and hangment ; although I will not 
deny these second means to be lawful, provided the former be 
first used." A bishop who thought for himself after this fashion 
— denying to the Lollards that deductions from their reading of 
the Bible were infallible, denying also to his brethren of the 
hierarchy the right to claim an uninquiring faith in dogmas of 
the church — opposed himself to the passions of the combatants 
on either side, and had no partisans. In 1457 a council was 
held at Westminster, in which all temporal lords refused to 
speak till Pecock had been expelled from it. The divines at 
this council appointed four and twenty doctors to examine Pe- 
cock' s books. The books were reported against, Pecock was 
declared a sickly sheep, and called upon to abjure or be burnt. 
He had admitted the right of the church thus to compel opin- 
ion, and he submitted. The executioner burnt, instead of the 
bishop, his works in three folios and eleven quartos, including 
a copy of that 4t Repressor " of his, a piece of natural fifteenth- 
century English, which 3'et survives as one of the best and most 



To A.D. 1500.] FORTESCUE. 127 

considerable specimens of early prose among the treasures of 
our literature. After some months Bishop Pecock was deprived 
of his see, and secluded in the Abbe}* of Thorney in Cambridge- 
shire, where he was confined to a private room within sight of 
an altar, was forbidden ever again to put pen to paper, and was 
to have access to no books but a breviary, a mass-book, a psal- 
ter, a legend, and a Bible. The doors of Thorney Abbey closed 
on him, and he was heard of no more. 

3. Even when distracted by contending factions, England 
was advancing towards freedom. The laws of the country- 
were not based like those of France upon the will of the 
monarch, but upon the will of the people through their repre- 
sentatives. An English lawyer, Sir John Fortescue, who 
was born in Devonshire, was chief justice of the King's Bench 
from 1442 to 14G0, and lived, it is said, to the age of ninety, 
wrote in the latter part of his life a strong and noble book' 
on the " Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarch}*," 
his chief object being to show the superiority of a constitutional 
over a despotic government. The strength of constitutional 
feeling in this chief English lawyer of the fifteenth century may 
be inferred from his manner of dating the absolute regal domin- 
ion from Nimrod, who '-first acquired to himself a kingdom, 
though he is not called a king in the Scripture, but a mighty 
hunter before the Lord. For," says Fortescue, "as a hunter 
behaves towards beasts, which are naturally wild and free ; so 
did he oblige mankind to be in servitude and to obey him." He 
went back even to the mythical time for the free spirit of the 
English body politic. " The kingdom of England," he says, 
" had its original from Brut and the Trojans who attended him 
from Italy and Greece, and became a mixed kind of govern- 
ment, compounded of the regal and political." Going as far 
back as he could, he was unable to find or conceive an English 
people passively obedient to any one irresponsible master. The 
nation was advancing slowly in his days ; there was social con- 
fusion, and intellectual life seemed to be numbed, while events 
of great moment were happening abroad. But if there was no 
guiding light of genius, there was the sense of God and duty in 
the people which enabled them to find their own way till the 
next guides came. 



128 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1400 

4. William Caxton, born about 1422, in the Weald of 

Kent, was apprenticed to a wealthy London mercer. After his 
master's death, in 1441, he lived chiefly in Brabant, Flanders, 
Holland, and Zealand, for thirty years and more. In 1464 he 
was employed by Edward IV. as one of two commissioners for 
the settlement of a treaty of commerce with Philip the Good, 
Duke of Burgundy. Afterward, Caxton was in the service of 
Edward IV. 's sister Margaret, who married Charles the Bold. 
In 1469, he began to translate from French into English the 
"Histories of Troy," and finished it in 1471. Having done 
this, he says that he " practised and learnt at great charge and 
expense " the art of printing, to enable him to strike off in one 
day many copies. He seems to have learnt the art at Cologne, 
of Conrad Winters, who had set up his press there in 1470. 

The first book printed by him was his translation, also from 
the French, of a moral treatise, " The Game and Play of the 
Chess." Of this there are two editions, the first said to have 
been finished on the last day of March, 1474. It is assumed 
to be the first book printed in England. Perhaps it was ; but 
there is no evidence that Caxton did not print it at Cologne. 
It is to the printed copy of the translation of "Les Dictes 
Moraux des Philosophes," as " The Dictes and Sayings of Phi- 
losophers," ~by Anthony Woodville, Earl Eivers, that Caxton 
first added, " imprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westnryn- 
stre ; " and the date of it is 1477. A book of 1480 specifies 
the Abbey as the place where Caxton had his press. Eesort to 
the Abbey scriptorium for copies of books had led to a settle- 
ment of copyists within the Abbey precints. The new-born 
giant was in its mother's lap when Caxton, who had learnt the 
new art as a business speculation, worked his press at Westmin- 
ster Abbey among the professional transcribers whom he found 
there busy with their pens. From the beginning until his death 
in 1492, Caxton worked with astonishing industry, both as a 
printer and as a writer. Though already stricken in years, he 
published, in all, sixty-four volumes, and himself translated 
into English not fewer than five thousand closely printed folio 
pages. His is one of the worthiest names in English literature. 

5. The most delightful example of English prose produced in 



T0A.D.1500.] LORD RIVERS. 129 

this century is " The Byrth, Lif, and Actes of Kyng Arthur," 
printed b}', Caxton in 1485, and frequently reprinted since then. 
The book is often entitled " Morte d' Arthur." Of its author, 
Sir Thomas Malory, almost nothing is now known. Some 
suppose him to have been a Welsh priest ; also, that he died a 
little before his book passed through Caxton 's press. At any 
rate, the book itself is a storehouse of racy English words, and 
for delight of reading is still one of the most exquisite books in 
our literature. It is a felicitous selection, chiefly from French 
romances, of the best legends concerning King Arthur, and the 
knights and ladies of his court. Few books equal it in simpli- 
city and sweetness of phrase, in poetic and dramatic vividness, 
in the grace of chivalric feeling. Sir Walter Scott pronounced 
it ' ' indisputably the best prose romance the language can 
boast;" and Robert Southey said of it, that "there was no 
book, except 'The Faery Queen,' " which, in his boyhood, he 
" perused so often or with such deep contentment." 

6. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who was beheaded on Tower 
Hill in 1470, translated into English Cicero's " De Amicitia." Antho- 
ny Woodville, Lord Rivers, translated, from the French, " Dictes 
and Sayings of the Philosophers," the first book upon which Caxton put 
his imprint. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH 
CENTURY. 



PROSE-WRITERS. 



Sir Thomas More. 
Henry VIII. 
Hugh Latimer. 
William Tyndal. 
John Bellenden. 



Robert Fabyan. 
Edward Hall. 
Lord Berners. 
John Leland. 
Sir Thomas Elyot. 



John Skelton. 
William Dunbar. 
Gavin Douglas. 
Sir David Lindsay. 
Sir Thomas Wyatt. 



POETS. 



Earl of Surrey. 
Alexander Barclay. 
Stephen Hawes. 
William Roy. 



DRAMATIC WRITERS. 



John Skelton. 

Sir David Lindsay. 



Nicholas Udall. 
John Heywood. 



CHAPTER V. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: 
PROSE- WRITERS. 

1. Characters of the English Monarchs.— 2. The New Learning and its Chief 
Promoters. — 3. Sir Thomas More. — 4. Henry VIII. as an Author. — 5. Hugh 
Latimer. — 6. William Tyndal.— 7, Other English Translators of the Bible. 

— 8. Chroniclers in Latin. — 9. Chroniclers in English; John Bellenden ; 
Robert Fabyan; Edward Hall; Lord Beruers's Froissart. — 10. John Leland. 

— 11. Sir Thomas Elyot. 

1. At the opening of the sixteenth century, Hemy VII. was 
King of England. In 1509, he was succeeded by his son, Hen- 
ry VIII., who reigned until 1547 ; in which year Edward VI. 
came to the throne, and reigned until 1553. The intellectual 
character of the time was affected by the personal characters of 
these monarchs. Henry VII., whose nature was cold, greedy, 
jealous, despotic, but essentially commonplace, "looked with 
dread and suspicion on the one movement which broke the 
apathy of his reign, the great intellectual revolution which bears 
the name of the Revival of Letters." Henry VIII. , on the 
other hand, though equally despotic and far more violent and 
dangerous, was " from the first openly on the side of the new 
learning," and was not only a fair scholar and a wit, but a 
lover of scholars and of wits. Edward VI., who was but a boy 
of sixteen when he died, w r as of saintly disposition, in favor of 
the Protestant Reformation, and fond of learning, but was con- 
trolled by the two powerful noblemen, Somerset and Northum- 
berland, w r ho in succession were the real kings. 

2. The most remarkable feature of this portion of the six- 
teenth century is the energy with whieh "the new learning" 
was both cultivated and resisted in England. In the } T ear 1500, 
there lived six Englishmen who were then the chief promoters of 
the new English scholarship : Grocyn, fifty-eight years old ; Lin- 
acre, about fort}^ ; John Fisher, forty-one ; John Colet, thirty - 

133 



134 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

four ; William Lily, about thirtj'-two ; and Thomas More, twenty. 
Often at a distance from these men, but in. full sj'mpathy with 
them, and ready to help them at any moment by his learning, 
his eloquence, and his wit, was the renowned scholar Erasmus, 
who had taught Greek at Oxford. The eldest of these men, 
William Grocyn, was born in 1442; and after obtaining all 
the learning that England could give him, he went to Italy and 
learned Greek. In 1491, he settled at Exeter College, Oxford, 
as the first teacher of that language in England, having at one 
time Erasmus among his pupils. He died in 1522, being then 
master of All Hallow's College at Maidstone. 

Next comes Thomas Linacre, a physician, about eighteen 
years j-ounger than Grocyn, and fellow of All Souls' College, 
Oxford. Early in the reign of Henry VII., he was sent on 
a mission to the court of Rome, and staid by the way at 
Florence to learn Greek. On his return to Oxford, he gave 
lectures on medicine, and taught Greek and Latin. He was 
chief founder of the Koyal College of Physicians ; he did much 
for Latin scholarship in England ; and died in 1524. 

Next in this group of scholars is John Fisher, Bishop of 
Rochester, of about the same age as Linacre. He invited 
Erasmus to Cambridge, and supported him in the endeavor to 
teach Greek there. 

John Colet, born in 1466, was the son of Sir Henry Colet, 
a wealthy knight of London, and twice its Lord Mayor. After 
seven years at Oxford, he studied in Paris, and then went to 
Italy and learned Greek. In 1505, he became Dean of St. 
Paul's. In 1510, the death of his father gave him a large in- 
heritance, with a part of which he founded St. Paul's School, 
— at once a flourishing seat of the new scholarship. He died, 
after a noble and most useful life, in 1519. 

When John Colet founded St. Paul's School, he appointed as 
its head master his friend William Lily, an excellent Greek 
scholar, a man about two years younger than himself. His 
most famous book was the "Latin Grammar," which Henry 
VIII. sanctioned so vigorously, that he declared it penal 
publicly to teach any other, and which continued to be in use 
in England for many generations. 



To A.D. 1550.] SIR THOMAS MORE. 135 

3. The youngest and the most brilliant man in this group of 
scholars who early in the sixteenth century, against formidable 
opposition, gave to English thought and English literature the 
awakening that came with the new scholarship, was Thomas 
More. He was born in 1480, the son of Sir John More, a 
justice of the King's Bench. While still a lad, Thomas More 
became an inmate of the household of the powerful Cardinal 
John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chan- 
cellor. 

Morton had been one of the foremost of Oxford scholars when Wil- 
liam Grocyn was a child. He was Doctor of Laws and Vice-Chancellor 
of the University in 1446. He practised law, and obtained many church 
benefices; was Master of the Bolls in 1472, Bishop of Ely in 1478, — the 
same Bishop of Ely of whom the Brotector Bichard, about to seize the 
crown, said: 

" My Lord of Ely, -when I was last in Holborn, 
I saw good strawberries in your garden there ; 
I do beseech you send for some of them; " 

an hour before he sent him to the Tower. When afterwards released, 
and transferred to the custody of the Duke of Buckingham, Morton 
helped to organize the insurrection which cost Buckingham his head; 
and, being himself safe in Flanders, was thenceforth busy as a negotiator 
on the side that triumphed at Bosworth Field. Thus Morton became 
the trusted friend of Henry VII., who at the beginning of his reign 
made him, in 1486, Lord Chancellor of England, and nine months after- 
wards Archbishop of Canterbury. While upholding the sovereignty of 
the archbishop in spiritual things, Morton, as Henry VII. 's chief adviser, 
maintained in temporal affairs the absolute sovereignty of the king. He 
greatly enriched himself, but was liberal with his wealth. He helped 
the king, more narrowly avaricious, to draw money, by benevolences or 
otherwise, from his subjects; and he shared the king's unpopularity. 

Morton was a vigorous old man of between seventy and 
eighty, whose life was blended with the histoiy of half a cen- 
tuiy, when young Thomas More was placed in his household, 
and found him a generous patron and appreciative friend. A 
son of one of lower rank was often received of old into a great 
man's house. He wore there his lord's livery, but had it of 
.more costly materials than were used for the footmen, and was 
the immediate attendant of his patron, w T ho was expected to 
give him a start in life when he came of age. When at Christ- 
mas time a Latin play was acted, young Thomas More could 



136 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

step in at will among the players, and extemporize a comic 
part. "Whoever liveth to try it," Morton would say, "shall 
see this child here waiting at table prove a notable and rare 
man." Dean Colet used to sa} T , "There is but one wit in 
England, and that is } T oung Thomas More." About the } T ear 
1497 the archbishop sent the youth to Oxford, where he was 
entered to Canterbury College, now included in Christ Church. 
There he learned Greek of Linacre and Grocyn. In 1499 he 
removed thence to London, and proceeded to stud} T law at 
Lincoln's Inn. In 1500 Archbishop Morton died. 

While studying law, More, who was earnestly religious, tried 
on himself for a time the experiment of monastic discipline ; 
wore a hair shirt, took a log for a pillow, whipped himself on 
Fridays. At the age of twenty-one he entered Parliament, and 
soon after he had been called to the bar he was made an Under- 
SherirT of London. In 1503 he opposed in the House of Com- 
mons Hemy VII. 's proposal for a subsidy on account of the 
marriage-portion of his daughter Margaret ; and he opposed 
with so much energy, that the House refused to grant it. One 
went and told the king that a beardless boy had disappointed 
all his expectations. During the last years, therefore, of 
Henry VII., More was under the displeasure of the king, and 
had thoughts of leaving the country. But in the first 3-ears of 
the reign of Henry VIII. he was rising to large practice in the 
law courts, where it is said he refused to plead in cases which 
he thought unjust, and took no fees from widows, orphans, or 
the poor. He would have preferred marrying the second 
daughter of John Colt, of New Hall, in Essex, but chose her 
elder sister, that he might not subject her to the discredit of 
being passed over. In 1513, Thomas More, then under-sher- 
iff of London, is said to have written his "History of the Life 
and Death of King Edward V., and of the Usurpation *of 
Richard III.," first printed in 1557, from a MS. in his writ- 
ing. The work comes down to us both in Latin and in Eng- 
lish ; and although More's son-in-law, who first printed it, 
believed it to have been written by More, there is some reason 
to think that the Latin original was the work of Cardinal Mor- 
ton, and the English version only the work of More. If the 



To A.D. 1550.] • SIR THOMAS MORE. 137 

book was wholly More's, it must have been written from infor- 
mation chiefly derived from his old patron, Morton. 

In 1515, two 3'ears after Thomas More is supposed to have 
written the book just mentioned, he was sent by the king on an 
embassy into Flanders, " for the debatement and determination " 
of matters in dispute between Hemy VIII. and Charles V. In 
1516, he was again sent thither on the same business. During 
these visits in Flanders, More was much with his friend Eras- 
mus, and found also a new friend, Peter Giles, a scholarly and 
courteous 3'oung man who was secretary to the municipality of 
Antwerp. It was in these two } T ears that Thomas More wrote 
his celebrated book "Utopia," — the most significant literary 
production of this period, and one of the most notable produc- 
tions in English literature. It was written in Latin, and first 
printed at Louvain in 1516. It was afterward reprinted at 
Basle, at Paris, and at Vienna, but never in England during 
More's lifetime. Its first publication in England was in 1551, 
in the delightful English translation made hy Ralph Robinson ; 
which translation was revised and republished in 1556. 

More's " Utopia" has given an adjective to our language, — we call 
an impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under the veil of a playful fic- 
tion, the talk is intensely earnest, and abounds in practical suggestion. 
It is the work of a scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his 
own way the chief political and social evils of his time. Having com- 
mended the book in a witty letter to his friend Giles, More tells in the 
first part how he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert Tunstal, " whom 
the king's majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men, did prefer 
to the office of Master of the Rolls; " how the commissioners of Charles 
met them at Bruges, and presently returned to Brussels for instructions ; 
and how More then went to Antwerp, where he found a pleasure in the 
society of Peter Giles, which soothed his desire to see again his wife and 
children, from whom he had been four months away. One day, when 
he came from the service in Antwerp Cathedral, More fables that he saw 
his friend Giles talking to " a certain stranger, a man well stricken in 
age, with a black sunburnt face, a long beard, and a cloak cast homely 
about his shoulders," whom More judged to be a mariner. Peter Giles 
introduced him to his friend as Raphael Hythloday (the name, from the 
Greek vdloc and duioc, means "knowing in trifles"), a man learned in 
Latin and profound in Greek, a Portuguese wholly given to philosophy, 
who left his patrimony to his brethren, and, desiring to know far coun- 
tries, went with Amerigo Vespucci in the three last of the voyages of 



138 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

which an account had been printed in 1507. From the last voyage he 
did not return with Vespucci, but got leave to be one of the twenty-four 
men left in Grulike. Then he travelled on until having reached Calicut 
he found there one of the ships of his own country to take him home. 
So it was that in the course of travel Raphael Hythloday had visited the 
Island of Utopia, unknown to other men; had dwelt there for five years, 
and had become familiar with its customs. More's book, which expresses 
much of the new energy of independent thought, was thus associated 
with the fresh discovery of the Xew World. 

After the greeting in the street, Raphael Hythloday and Peter Giles 
went with More to his house; " and there," says More, " in my garden, 
upon a bench covered with green torves, we sat down talking together." 
The talk was of the customs among men, and of the government of 
princes. Why would not Hythloday give his experience as counsellor of 
some great prince, since " from the prince, as from a perpetual well- 
spring, cometh among the people the flood of all that is good or evil " ? 
Thomas More had withheld himself from such service; and he put two 
reasons fordoing so into the mouth of Hythloday. First, that " most 
princes have more delight in war (the knowledge of which I neither have 
nor desire) than in the good feats of peace, and employ much more study 
how by right or wrong to enlarge their dominions than how well and 
peaceably to rule and govern that they have already." Secondly, because 
" every king's counsellor is so wise in his own eyes, that he will not allow 
another man's counsel, if it be not shameful, flattering assent." More 
had in mind the supreme counsels of Wolsey, abetting Henry VIII." s war 
policy, and doing little to secure peace and well-being for the English. 
When Raphael Hythloday' s talk in the garden had excited curiosity by its 
frequent reference to the way things were done in Utopia, he was per- 
suaded to give an account of that wonderful island. His description 
forms the second part of the little book. It is designedly fantastic in sug- 
gestion of details, the work of a scholar who had read Plato's "Republic," 
and had his fancy quickened after reading Plutarch's account of Spartan 
life under Lycurgus. But never was there a more direct upholding of the 
duty of a king in his relation to the country governed than In Thomas 
More's "Utopia." Beneath the veil of an ideal communism, into which 
there has been worked some witty extravagance, there lies a noble English 
argument. Sometimes More puts the case as of France when he means 
England. Sometimes there is ironical praise of the good faith of Chris- 
tian kings, saving the book from censure as a political attack upon the 
policy of Henry VIII. Thus protected, More could declare boldly that 
it were best for the king " to content himself with his own kingdom, to 
make much of it, to enrich it, and to make it as flourishing as he could, 
to endeavor himself to love his subjects, and again to be beloved by 
them, willingly to live with them, peaceably to govern them, and with 
other kingdoms not to meddle, seeing that which he hath already is even 
enough for him, yea, and more than he can well turn him to." But 



To A. D. i 5 50.] SIR THOMAS MORE. 189 

Hythloday added, " ' This mine advice, Master More, how think you it 
would be heard and taken ? ' 'So, God help me, not very thankfully, 
quod I.' " The prince's office, in More's " Utopia," " continueth all his 
lifetime, unless he be deposed or put down for suspicion of tyranny." 
In the chapter on the religions in Utopia, More wrote of King Utopus, 
who conquered the country because it was distracted with quarrels about 
religion, that " first of all he made a decree that it should be lawful for 
every man to favor and follow what religion he would, and that he might 
do the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peace- 
ably, gently, quietly, and soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuk- 
ing and inveighing against each other. If he could not by fair and 
gentle speech induce them unto his opinion, yet he should use no kind 
of violence, and refrain from displeasant and seditious words. To him 
that would vehemently and fervently in this cause strive and contend 
was decreed banishment and bondage. This law did King Utopus make, 
not only for the maintenance of peace, which he saw through continual 
content ion and mortal hatred utterly extinguished, but also because he 
thought this decree would work for the furtherance of religion." 

The subsequent writings of Thomas More are of but little 
interest to the student of literature, being entirely devoted to 
theological controversy, and written in the coarse and rancorous 
style then thought to be necessaiy in all controversy. In 1520, 
four years after the first publication of his "Utopia," he was 
made Treasurer of the Exchequer; in 1521, he was made Sir 
Thomas ; in 1523, he was chosen Speaker of the House of 
Commons ; in 1529, he became Lord High Chancellor, and re- 
mained so for three years ; and in 1535, .having given offence to 
Henry VIII. by his resignation of that office, and hy his refusal 
to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, he was found guihVy 
of treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill. Before the troubles 
connected with the king's divorce, Heniy VIII. had delighted 
in his society, and would pa} T him unceremonious visits in the 
house at Chelsea to which he had removed from Bucklersbury. 
"Great honor," said one of his family, "was this to him." 
"Yes," answered More, "the king is my very good master; 
but if my head would win his Majest} 7 a castle in France, it 
would not fail to be struck off my shoulders." 

Sir Thomas More has been accused of using the powder of his 
great office as Lord High Chancellor in the infliction of bodily 
cruelties upon persons suspected of heres}-. This accusation is 



140 MANUAL OF EXG-LISH LITERATURE. [A.D. i£C3 

undoubtedly groundless. Nevertheless, in his controversu I 

writings, he was at times false to the liberal principles laid down 
in his " Utopia " and illustrated by the main course of his life. 
He was not himself persecutor, but he was defending his own 
church at a time when it believed that thousands might be aa 
from everlasting fire by terror of the burning of a few. He 
flinched from the practical enforcement of that doctrine w 
he himself wielded the terrors of the law. Br.: abroad and at 
home it was enforced by governments, when, in reply to Tyn- 
dal's sentence. "If our shepherds had : een as willing to feed 
as to shear, we had needed no such dispici ence, noi they to have 
burnt so many as they have." More admitted that there would 
have been less heresy if there had been more diligence in pic: sh- 
ing. and said, '' Sure if the prelates had taken as good heed in 
time as they should have done, there should peradventure at 
length fewer have been burned thereby. But there should have 
been more burned by a great many than there have been within 
this seven year last past ; the lack whereof. I fear me. will make 
more burned within this seven year next coming than else should 
have needed to have been burned in sevenseore." Let us be 
just to More, without forgetting that he has left this sentence. 
written in 1532. to be quoted against him. He did support in 
controversy — and that not in a single passage — the fierce 
policy of persecution. If he did not hirnself light niartyr fires, 
he at least publicly assented to the argument by which they were 
sustained. By zeal for his church, when days of conflict came. 
Store's calm philosophy was pa through a furnace, and 

did not come out nnsinged. 

4. Besides the * ' Utopia '*' — which was not in English — there 
was not produced by any Engl: slim an. during the first half of. 
the sixteenth century, any original prose-work of great power. 
The most characteristic expression of the time is in religic - 
and theological literature, often bitterly controversial. 

In this department, King Henry VIII. distinguished him- 
self; publishing in 1521, against Luther, " the arch-heretic 
Latin treatise on "The Seven Sacraments." For this book, 
Pope Leo X. conferred on the monarch of England the title of 
•• Defender of the Faith." Luther repli ue king in two 



To A. D. 1550.] HUGH LATIMER. 141 

letters ; and in December, 1526, appeared, in Latin, King 
Henry's answer to Luther, printed with Luther's letter and an 
address to the pious reader. At the beginning of 1527 there 
was published also in English " A Copy of the Letters wherin 
the most Redoubted and Mighty Prince our Soverayne Lorde 
Kynge Hemy the Eight, Kynge of Englande and of France, 
Defensor of the Faith, and Lorde of Ireland, made Answer 
unto a certayne Letter of Martyn Luther," etc. 

5. One of the most racy and vigorous of these religious 
writers was Hugh Latimer, born about 1491, the son of a 
yeoman in Leicestershire. At the age of thirty, he graduated 
Bachelor of Divinity at Cambridge, where he had already taken 
his master's degree and held a fellowship. Though at first 
opposed to the Protestant Reformation, he soon changed his 
opinion. Gaining the favor of Henry VIII., and having the 
friendship of Archbishop Cranmer, Latimer was, in 1535,- made 
Bishop of Worcester. In the controversies of the times he 
took a bold part ; he was an energetic and popular preacher ; 
and after many vicissitudes, he and Ridle t y were burned at 
Oxford in 1555. When the lighted fagot was placed at the 
feet of Ridley, Latimer exclaimed, "Be of good comfort, 
Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such 
a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be 
put out." 

His sermons, many of which were printed in his own time, 
form, in the modern edition of them, two volumes. His preach- 
ing was essentially English ; homely, practical, and straight -to 
its purpose. There was no speculative refinement, but a simple 
sense of duty to be done for love of God. He pointed dis- 
tinctly to the wrongs he preached against. After three of his 
Lent sermons before the king, three hundred and seventy-three 
pounds retained dishonesty were restored to the state hy cer- 
tain of the king's officers. He enlivened his admonition with 
shrewd sayings, recollections of life, genial humor. In many 
respects Latimer personified the spiritual life of the work-a-day 
Englishman. In his fifth sermon on the Lord's Prayer, when 
he was arguing that the .true religious houses had not been 
pulled down, he said, " I read once a story of a holy man, some 



142 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

say it was St. Anthony, which had been a long season in the 
wilderness, eating nor drinking nothing but bread and water ; 
at the length, he thought himself so holy that there should be 
nobocly like unto him. Therefore, he desired of God to know 
who should be his fellow in heaven. God made him answer, 
and commanded him to go to Alexandria, there he should find 
a cobbler which should be his fellow in heaven. So he went 
thither and sought him out, and fell acquainted with him, and 
tarried with him three or four days to see his conversation. In 
the morning his wife and he prayed together, then the}' went to 
their business, he in his shop, and she about her housewifery. 
At dinner-time they had bread and cheese, wherewith they were 
well content, and took it thankfully. Their children were well 
taught to fear God, and to say their Paternoster, and the Creed, 
and the Ten Commandments, and so he spent his time in doing 
his duty truly. I warrant you he did not so man}' false stitches 
as cobblers do nowadays. St. Anthony, perceiving that, came to 
the knowledge of himself, and laid away all pride and presump- 
tion. By this example you m^y learn that honest conversation 
and godly living is much regarded before God, insomuch that 
this poor cobbler, doing his duty diligently, was made St. 
Anthony ' s fellow . ' ' 

6. Another strong writer of the time was William Tyndal, 
born in Gloucestershire, probably in 1484. After graduating 
at Oxford, and spending some years at Cambridge, he became, 
about 1519, tutor in the family of a Gloucestershire gentleman, 
Sir John Walsh, of Little Sodbury. He translated into Eng- 
lish the Enchiridion of Erasmus, which argues that Chris- 
tian life is a warfare against evil, sustained rather by obeying 
Christ than by faith in scholastic dogmas. As the controversy 
about Luther gathered strength, Tyndal supported Luther's 
cause so earnestly that he was cited before the Chancellor of 
the diocese of Worcester, and warned. In dispute afterwards 
with a Worcestershire divine, he said, "If God spare my life, 
ere many years I will cause a boy that clriveth the plough shall 
know more of the Scriptures than thou dost." Afterward 
going to London, he was received into the house of Humphrey 
Monmouth, a rich draper, liberal of mind and purse. There 



To A.D. 1550.] WILLIAM TYNDAL. 143 

he was for about half a year, and, as Monmouth said afterwards, 
when in trouble for his own opinions, "he lived like a good 
priest, as methought. He studied most part of the da}' and of 
the night at his book, and he would eat but sodden meat b}- his 
good will, nor drink but small-beer." T}mdal was a small and 
thin man, who lived sparely, and studied without stint. He 
must have been alread}* at work in Monmouth's house on his 
translation of the New Testament from Greek into English. 
Finding, as he said afterwards of himself, " not only that there 
was no room in nry Lord of London's palace to translate the 
New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all 
England," Tyndal left England for Hamburg, where he increased 
his knowledge of Hebrew. He was skilled in Hebrew, Greek, 
and Latin, in Italian, Spanish, French, and German. Although 
no copies of such an edition are now extant, there is reason to 
believe that Tyndal at once printed, somewhere on the Conti- 
nent, his translation into English of two of the Gospels, those 
of Matthew and Mark. He then, in 1525, secretly printed, 
beginning to print at Cologne and finishing at Worms, three 
thousand copies of his translation of the New Testament into 
English, in a quarto edition, of which only one fragment 
remains. There was added to it immediately a second edition 
of three thousand copies in octavo, printed at Worms. This 
was three years after Luther's publication, in September, 1522, 
of his translation of the New Testament into German ; and 
Luther's version was freely used by Tyndal in his own work. 
It was asserted also, by the English bishops, that there were 
three thousand errors in Tyndal' s translation ; of which, War- 
ham, Archbishop of Canterbury, bought up and destined all 
the copies he could find. Five 3-ears afterward, in 1530, 
Tyndal printed in Hesse his translation of the Pentateuch. In 
1535, he was arrested at Antwerp ; and in the following 3'ear, 
at Vilvoorden, he was strangled and burnt ; his last words 
being, " Lord, open the king of England's eyes." 

Of his translation of the New Testament, George P. Marsh 
says that it "is the most important philological monument of 
the first half of the sixteenth centuiy, perhaps I should say of 
the whole period between Chaucer and Shakespeare, both as an 



14-1 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

historical relic, and as having more than any thing else con- 
tributed to shape and fix the sacred dialect, and establish the 
form which the Bible must permanently- assume in an English 
dress." 

Tj-ndaTs original writings are numerous, consisting of expo- 
sitions of Scripture, theological treatises, and an answer to Sir 
Thomas More's "Dialogue." 

7. The invention of printing had caused a wide diffusion of 
the Bible in the received Latin version, known as the Vulgate. 
Between the 3-ears 1462 and 1500, eighty editions of it were 
printed. In 1516, Erasmus published a corrected edition of 
the New Testament both in Greek and in Latin ; and in the 
Introduction, he said that the Scriptures addressed all, adapted 
themselves even to the understanding of children, and that it 
were well if they could be read by all people in all languages ; 
that none could reasonably be cut off from a blessing as much 
meant for all as baptism and the other sacraments. Erasmus 
only expressed a demand which the people of many countries 
were anxious to utter for themselves ; and for the English 
people, the attempt to satisfy this demand was made b} T other 
men as well as b} T Tyndal. 

In 1535, at Zurich, was printed for the first time a complete 
translation of the Bible into English ; the translator being 
Miles Coverdale, an Augustine monk of Cambridge, who had 
adopted the principles of the Reformation, and had assisted 
Tyndal in his partial version. In the same } T ear, Thomas 
Cromwell, Secretary of State to Heniy VIII. , was in search of 
an English Bible which might go among the people and escape 
the charge of containing heresies. Coverdale 's translation was 
submitted to the English bishops, who said that it had mam r 
faults. "But," said the king, "are there an}' heresies main- 
tained thereb} r ? ' ' And when they said that the}^ had found 
none, he answered, " Then, in God's name, let it go among the 
people." The ro} T al license was obtained ; but the introduction 
of Coverdale's translation, printed in 1535, was delayed by the 
necessity of striking out the name of the king's " most dearest, 
just wife, Anne," which stood with his own in the dedication. 
The first printed copies of the whole Bible were admitted into 



To A.D. 1550.] ENGLISH BIBLES. 145 

England in 1536, the } T ear of the burning of Tj'ndal, the 3*ear 
also in which Tyndal's New Testament was first printed in 
England. Coverdale's translation was described on the title- 
page as having been made from the German and Latin, — 
" faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latin into 
English." He said that he had five several translations b} r 
him, and followed his interpreters. A new edition, revised 
and corrected, appeared in 1537, printed in England. 

In July of the same }'ear, there was published abroad 
a complete Bible in folio, professing to be -' truly and purely 
translated into English by Thomas Matthew." This was 
formed out of the translations of Tj-ndal and Coverdale, under 
the superintendence of John Rogers, who was afterwards 
famous as a mart}T, and who for this translation assumed the 
name of Matthew. His Bible, known as " Matthew's Bible," 
included all that had been done b}* Tyndal, namely his Penta- 
teuch, followed by other translations of his down to the end of 
the Second Book of Chronicles, and his New Testament. The 
other canonical books Rogers gave in a strict revision of Cover- 
dale's translation, and the Apocrypha he gave in a translation 
of his own. 

In 1538, Thomas Cromwell, who had become Lord Cromwell, 
planned a republication at Paris of Tj'ndal' s translation, in a 
form that would adapt it for free use ; and for this purpose he 
sent Miles Coverdale to Paris to superintend the printing. 
Being there in some peril from the Inquisition, the work was 
transferred to London, where, in 1539, appeared Coverdale's 
revision of Tyndal's work and his own, in the folio known both 
as " Cromwefl's Bible," and as " The Great Bible." 

In the same year was published a careful revision of " Mat- 
thew's Bible," made, under the patronage of Cromwell, by 
Richard Taverner, an Oxford Reformer, then attached to the 
court. This edition was called " Taverner' s Bible." 

Finally, in 1540, appeared the most authoritative of the ver- 
sions made in Henry VIII.'s reign. It was a revision of " The 
Great Bible," planned by Cranmer as Archbishop of Canter- 
bur}*, and made hy direct collation with the Hebrew and Greek 
texts. It was first published in April, 1540, with a prologue 



146 MANUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

by Cranmer ; and, besides retaining the name of "The Great 
Bible," was also called " Cranmer's Bible." This became, 
and remained till 1568, the translation appointed to be read 
in churches. Its version of the Psalms is retained to this 
day by the Church of England in its Book of Common 
Prayer. 

8. The treatment of historical events in England was still in 
the hands of chroniclers ; and. even doling the first half of the 
sixteenth century, several of the chroniclers wrote in Latin in 
preference to English. 

Of the Latin chroniclers, we first encounter Bernard Andre, born 
at Toulouse, an Austin friar, who was present at Henry VII.' s entry 
into London after Bosworth Field. He was blind; he was a scholar, and 
wrote verses; and having gained favor at court, he became tutor to 
Arthur, Prince of Wales, and styled himself Henry VLT.'s poet laureate. 
In 1500, having retired from court, he began to work at his Latin " Life 
of Henry TIL,*' finished in 1502; as well as to compile yearly accounts 
of the chief events of his time. There remain, however, his records of 
only four years, the latest being 1521. This blind French poet and 
historiographer, naturalized in England, although no genius, had much 
repute in his own clay. 

Polydore Vergil, born at L'rbino, had von fame in Italy before he 
came to England for Peter's Pence, and was there made Archdeacon of 
Wells. He returned to Italy, and died there in 1555. Among his works, 
all written in Latin, is an "English Chronicle,'' in twenty-seven books, 
begun by him in the latter years of Henry VIL, and finished in the 
earlier years of the reign of Henry VIII. 

John Mair (Latinized Major), a Scotchman, born in 1469, a famous 
theologian of his day, having been professor of divinity both at the 
Sorbonne and at St. Andrews, and having had both Knox and Buchanan 
among his pupils, wrote in Latin theological and moral treatises, and a 
"History of Great Britain,"' in six books, which joined' the Chronicles 
of England and Scotland, and was published at Paris in 1521, the year 
in which Luther appeared at the Diet of Worms. This book, by a 
Scottish doctor of the Sorbonne, was not sparing in condemnation of 
the corruptions of the clergy and the usurpations of the court of Rome. 
For each period Mair gave first the English history, and then the Scot- 
tish. For its free speech, Blair's History was placed by the orthodox 
abroad below its author's scholastic writings. Mair died in 1550. 

Another Scottish chronicler was Hector Boece (Boyce), professor 
of the College of Montacute. who published at Paris, in 1526, his Latin 
•• History of the Scots," in nineteen books. Boece was born at Dundee 
about 1165, educated at Aberdeen and Paris, where he taught philoso- 



To A. D. 1550.] ROBERT FABYAN. 147 

phy, and afterwards was principal of King's College, Aberdeen. Eras- 
mus corresponded with him, and the King of Scotland pensioned him. 
He died about 1536. 

9. But the most memorable chroniclers during this time were 
those who wrote in English. The Latin chronicle last men- 
tioned was translated into English, and published at Edinburgh 
in 1536, under the title of the " Histoiy and Chroniklis of Scot- 
land," forming one of the most important pieces of old Scottish 
prose. The translator was John Bellenden, who matriculated 
as a student of St. Andrews in 1508. He was liberally edu- 
cated, and obtained much credit as a poet at the court of James 
V., in whose service he had been from the time of the king's 
infanc} T . His translation of Boece was made at request of this 
king, for whom also he began a translation of Livy, of which he 
completed only the first five books. Bellenden, when he pub- 
lished his translation of Boece, was a doctor in the Church, 
Archdeacon of Mora}', and Canon of Ross ; but he added to his 
translation an earnest letter to James V. on the miseries of 
wicked princes and the duty of a king. Bellenden' s chief poem 
was a "Proheme of the Cosmographe," written for the king's 
instruction. He died at Rome, in 1550, an earnest honest man, 
and stout opponent of the Reformation. 

Robert Fabyan, an opulent citizen and politician of Lon- 
don, who died in 1512, wrote, partly in verse and partly in 
prose, his "Concordance of Histories," afterwards called 
"New Chronicles of England and France, in Two Parts." 
The work opened with a prologue in Chaucer's stanza, which 
represented its author as one who prepared material for the 
skilled artist or historian who should come after him to perfect 
what he had rudely shaped. The prologue ended with an invo- 
cation to the Virgin for help ; and the seven parts of the chroni- 
cle, which brought the histoiy from Brut to the year 1504, 
ended with seven metrical epilogues, entitled "The Seven Joj'S 
of the Blessed Virgin." The chronicle itself was in prose, 
with translation into English verse of any Latin verses that 
were cited. A notable example of this was Fabyan's English 
version of the Latin verses said to have been made by Edw r ard 
II. in his imprisonment. Though Fabyan was not credulous 



148 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

of miracles and marvels, he was a zealotfs churchman, and, in 
using monkish chronicles as material for his own compilation of 
history, was a devout adopter of the censures of all kings who 
were enemies to religious places. Of Becket he spoke as a 
"glorious martyr " and a " blessed saint ; " of Henry II. as a 
" hammer of Holy Church." 

With the name of Fabyan as a chronicler is associated that 
of Edward Hall, who was born in Shropshire at the end 
of the fifteenth century. He was in 1514 scholar of King's 
College, Cambridge, but removed to Oxford; about 15 18,. he 
entered at Gray's Inn, was called to the bar, became common 
sergeant and under-sheriff, and in 1540 one of the judges of the 
sheriff's court. His career belonged entirely to the reign of 
Hemy VIII., and he died in 1547. His history of " The Union 
of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and 
Yorke," commonly called Hall's "Chronicle," ended with the 
year 1532. It was first published in 1548, after its author's 
death, by Richard Grafton, who said that "Hall d} T ing, and 
being in his latter time not so painful and studious as he ought 
to have been," Grafton himself undertook the completion of it. 
This was a forbidden book under Philip and Mary. 

Of this branch of literature, the most agreeable specimen 
produced in the first half of the sixteenth centuiy, was the 
English translation of Froissart's " Chronicle," made \>y Lord 
Berners, and published in 1523. Lord Berners was educated 
at Oxford, travelled abroad, earned the favor of Hemy VII., 
and was made Iry Henry VIII. his Chancellor of the Exchequer 
for life. He translated the " Golden Book" of Marcus Aure- 
lius, and other works, and wrote also a Latin sacred plaj T , " Ite 
in Vineam Meam," which was acted in church at Calais after 
vespers. His translation of Froissart is among the best prose 
English of his time. 

10. Closely allied to these English chronicles is the famous 
" Itinerary " of John Leland, who was born in London about 
1506. He was one of the boys under William Lily at St. Paul's 
School. Thence he proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge. 
He took his degree of B.A. early in 1522, went then to Oxford, 
thence to the University of Paris. He became chaplain and 



To A. D. I550-] SIR THOMAS ELYOT. 149 

librarian to Henry VIII., who gave him, in June, 1530, the rec- 
tory of Poppeling, in the Marches of Calais. About 1533 he 
obtained the title of King's Antiquary ; three 3*ears later he had 
special license to keep a curate at Poppeling, and work in Eng- 
land. Then he was for six years, by royal commission, travel- 
ling over England, taking a particular account of the cities, 
towns, and villages of each county ; describing also the situa- 
tion, soil, course of the rivers, and number of miles from place 
to place. He set down the several castles, religious houses, and 
other public and private buildings, with account of the families 
of best note resident therein. He recorded windows and monu- 
ments of antiquity belonging to the several cathedrals, monas- 
teries, etc. He inspected also their libraries, took exact cata- 
logues of books, even made transcripts of matter useful to his 
purpose of setting forth a trustworthy account of the history 
and antiquities of the kingdom. Leland, although a church 
reformer, lamented the havoc made of valuable libraries at 
the dissolution of the monasteries, and he did what he could 
to bring into safe keeping the treasures of literature that he 
found. Upon his return to London, he settled down to arrange 
for the press his vast accumulations ; but after the excessive 
labor of several years, his brain gave wa}~, about 1550, and in 
that condition he died in 1552. During his lifetime, he had 
won distinction by publishing minor Latin poems ; but at his 
death, the great mass of his writings were still unpublished. 
Many of these were pilfered, and in a garbled form appeared 
on the pages of other antiquaries. It was not until more than 
a century and a half after his death, that his manuscripts were 
published. In 1709, his " Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britan- 
nicis," edited by Anthon} T Hall, was published in two volumes ; 
and in 1715, his " Collectanea de Rebus Britannicis," edited by 
Thomas Hearne, was published in six volumes. These are in 
Latin. His most celebrated work is in English, the '.* Itinera- 
ry," likewise edited by Hearne, which was published in 1710- 
1712, in nine volumes. Some of his writings still remain in 
manuscript. 

11. A memorable piece of English writing in this time is 
"The Governor," by Sir Thomas Elyot, published in 1531, — 



150 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500. 

a prose treatise on education, generous and wise in its tone, 
and strongly opposing the custom of ill-treating schoolboys. 
Elyot was a graduate of Cambridge ; was knighted by Henry 
VIII., in whose service he was much employed in foreign em- 
bassies ; and died in 1546. Although his book on education is 
the one for which he is chiefly remembered, he wrote several 
other books, particularly "The Castle of Health." published 
in 1533 : a "Latin and English Dictionary." in 1538. the first 
ever published in England: and a w * Defence or Apology of 
Good Women," in 1545. 



CHAPTER VI. 

« 
FIRST HALF OF THE * SIXTEENTH CENTURY: 
POETRY AND THE DRAMA. 

1. John Skelton.— 2. William Dunbar. — 3. Gavin Douglas. — 4. Sir David Lindsay 
of the Mount. — 5. Sir Thomas Wyatt. — 6. Earl of Surrey. — 7. Alexander 
Barclay. — 8. Stephen Hawes. — 9. William Roy. — 10. Scottish Hymns.— 11. 
The Drama; the Morality-Play. — 12. Skelton's "Magnificence." — 13. Lind- 
say's Satire on the Three Estates. — 14. Rise of the Modern Drama. — 15. The 
First Comedy; Nicholas Udall.— 16. Masques. — 17. Interludes; John Hey- 
wood. 

1. During this period, six poets came into especial promi- 
nence, three of them being Scotsmen : John Skelton, William 
Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lindsay, Sir Thomas 
Wyatt, and the Earl of Surrey. These poets we shall first 
study in the order named ; then we shall deal with a few poets 
of less note ; and finally we shall examine the progress made 
up to 1550 in the development of the English drama. 

John Skelton was born either in Cumberland or in Norfolk, 
and not before the } T ear 1460. He took his Master's degree at 
Cambridge in 1484 ; and in 1490 he was spoken of by Caxton 
as "late created poet laureate" at Oxford. Several years 
later, he was admitted to the same title at Louvain and at Cam- 
bridge. The degree of poet laureate was then a recognized de- 
gree in grammar and rhetoric with versification. A wreath of 
laurel was presented to each new " poeta laureatus ; " and if 
this graduated grammarian obtained also a license to teach boys, 
he was publicly presented in the Convocation House with a rod 
and ferule. If he served a king, he might call himself the 
king's humble poet laureate ; as John Ka} T , of whom no verse 
remains, was, as far as we know, first to do, in calling himself 
poet laureate to Edward IV. Before obtaining this degree the 
candidate would be required to write a hundred Latin verses on 
the glory of the University, or some other accepted subject. 

151 



152 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

111 1498, Skelton took orders, and became afterwards rector 
of Diss, Norfolk ; at which time, he was likewise tutor to Prince 
Henry, afterward King Henry VIII. Dining the earlier days 
of Cardinal Wolse} T , Skelton was his friend ; but from about the 
year 1519, when Wolsey's oppressions of the clergy and the 
people became more severe, Skelton turned against him, and in 
his fearless and savage satires braved the great prelate's wrath. 
Against that wrath, the poet had finally to protect himself by 
taking the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, where he was 
safely sheltered until his death, in 1529. He never ceased to be 
nominal rector of Diss ; though he is said to have been sus- 
pended from his functions by Dr. Richard Nix, his diocesan, 
for inclination towards the opinions of the reformers. The par- 
ticular offence said to have been charged against John Skelton 
by the Dominicans was that he had violated the rule of celibac} T , 
by secret marriage to the mother of his children. 

The student who glances at the most popular of Skelton' s 
poems, written in the coarse and artless verse which has been 
named " Skeltonical," and which at first seems to be mere dog- 
gerel, will be in danger of concluding that Skelton himself was 
not a man of much learning or literary cultivation. In reality, 
however, he was both. That he had mairy university honors, 
that he was a tutor in the voydl family, and that he wrote 
Latin verses, and a prose treatise in Latin called " Speculum 
Principis," is proof of his learning; while his literary culti- 
vation was something for which he was distinguished in his 
own day. Caxton publicly appealed to him as an arbiter in 
matters of scholarship, saj'ing that Skelton had translated from 
the Latin, " not in rude and olde langage, but in polysshed and 
ornate termes craftely, as he that hath redde V}Tg}ie, Ovyde, 
Tullye, and all the other noble poets and oratours, to me un- 
knowen. And also he hath redde the nine muses, and under- 
stande theyr musicalle scyences, and to whom of the} T m eche 
scyence is appropred. I suppose he hath dronken of Ely con's 
well." At the end of the fifteenth century, when Prince Henry 
was nine 3 T ears old, Erasmus, in dedicating to the bo}^ a Latin 
ode in " Praise of Britain, King Hemy VII., and the ro}al 
children," congratulated him on being housed with Skelton, a 



To A.D. 1550.] JOHN SKELTON. 153 

special light and ornament of British literature (" umim Britan- 
niearum literaram lumen et decus "), who could not only kindle 
his desire for study, but secure its consummation. In the ode 
itself Erasmus again spoke of Skelton as Prince Heniy's guide 
to the sacred sources of learning. 

"While Skelton was still a student at Cambridge, he appears 
to have written a poem " On the Death of King Edward IV." 
Like one of the old metrical tragedies of men fallen from high 
estate, it tells — the dead king speaking — how the days of 
power, of wealth wrung from the commonalty, of costby works 
under a rule pleasing to some, to others displeasing, are at an 
end : 

" ]\Iercy I ask of my misdoing; 

What availeth it, friends, to be my foe, 
Sith I cannot resist nor amend your complaining ? 

Quid, ecce, nunc in pulvere dormio." 

The last line, suggesting royal pomp asleep in dust, is the 
refrain to every stanza. In 1489 Skelton wrote, in Chaucer's 
stanz?, an " Elegy upon the Death of the Earl of Northumber- 
land," who was killed 03- an insurgent populace in Yorkshire. 
During the latter part of the reign of Henry VII., probably, 
Skelton wrote his " Bowge of Court." It was an allegorical 
court poem against court follies and vices. 

Bowge is the French bouche (the mouth) ; and bowge of court was the 
old technical name for the right to feed at a king's table. Skelton here 
told, in Chaucer's stanza, how in autumn he thought of the craft of old 
poets who 

" Under as coverte terml's as could be 
Can touche a trouth, and cloke it subtylly 
With fresshe utteraunce full sentencyously." 

Weary with much thinking, he slept at the port of Harwich in mine 
host's house called " Power's Keye; " and it seemed to him that he saw 
sail into harbor a goodly ship, which cast anchor, and was boarded by 
traders who found royal merchandise in her. The poet also went on 
board, where he found no acquaintance, and there was much noise, 
until one commanded all to hold their peace, and said that the ship was 
the "Bowge of Court," owned by the Dame Saunce-pere (Peerless); 
that her merchandise was called Favor, and who would have it must 
pay dear. The poet found that there were seven subtle persons in the 
ship: 



154 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

" The first was Fav'ell, full of flatery, 

With fables false that well coude fayne a tale; 

The seconde was Suspecte, which that dayly 

Mj-sdempte eche man, with face deedly and pale; 

And Harry Hafter, that well coude picke a male; 
With other foure of theyr affynite, 

Dysdayne, Ryotte, Dyssymuler, Subtylte." 

These seven sins of the court had for their friend Fortune, who often 
danced with them; but they had no love for the new-comer, Dread, the 
name of the poet. Favell cloaked his ill-will with sugared speech. Dread 
thanked him, and was then addressed in turn by the other vices, each in 
his own fashion; and at last Dread, the poet, was about to jump out of 
the ship to avoid being slain, when he awoke, " caught penne and ynke, 
and wrote this lytyll boke." 

But Skelton's fame does not rest upon good thought put into 
this conventional disguise. He felt with the people ; and in the 
reign of Hemy VIII. we shall find him speaking with them, and 
for them, hx putting bold words of his own upon the life of his 
own day into a form of verse borrowed from nobodj'. This 
form of verse, which has been called Skeltonical, appeared in 
the delicately playful " Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe," the lament 
of a maid over the death of a pet sparrow. The lament ended 
with a Latin epitaph to the bird, and it was followed, by dainty 
commendations of its mistress. This poem, suggested no doubt 
by the Sparrow of Catullus, was "written by Skelton before the 
end of 15 OS. 

During the earlier years of the reign of Henry VIII., Skelton 
was in high favor with his old pupil; and later in the poet's 
life, it must have been in part the consciousness of the king's 
friendship for him that emboldened him to make his tremendous 
assaults on Cardinal Wolse} T . His favorite manner became sa- 
tiric, and even vituperative, animated b} T passionate indignation 
at the evils of the time, and by genuine sympathy with the dis- 
content of the people. The least creditable of his writings in 
this satiric vein are four minor poems, personally abusive of 
Sir Christopher Garnesche, gentleman usher to Hemy VIII., 
with whom Skelton had a " fry ting," — a contest of metrical 
scolding in billingsgate, for the diversion of the king and his 
court. This metrical scolding-match belongs to a form of lit- 
erature descended from the " tenson " or " jeu parti " of early 



To A. D. 1550.] JOHN SKELTON. 155 

Provencal poetry. The "tenson" was a song in dialogue of 
contention which found its way into European literature from 
wit-combats of the Arabs on nice points of love and philosoplry. 
But the fifteenth century advanced b} r many wa} T s to a rough 
heartiness in dealing with realities of life. Thus, in a flyting, 
which takes its name from our old name for contention, " flit," 
the two poets, who, if they had lived some centuries earlier, 
would, through a " tenson," have been attacking and defending 
castles in the air, were down upon earth belaboring each other 
with the pen as heartily as if thej T had come into the tilt-yard, 
and the pens were lances with which the}' were engaged, each 
in the playful endeavor to knock down his friend. Of course, 
such performance was a degradation of the character of poet 
and man of letters ; and in Skelton's case, as in that of every 
other satiric poet, satire does not deserve respect until it rises 
above personal petulance, and is inspired b} T wrath at great pub- 
lic wrongs, and by compassion for those who surfer such wrongs. 
The first of Skelton's great satires is " Speak, Parrot," 
written, not in his own peculiar verse, but in Chaucer's seven- 
lined stanza. It was written about 1523, at the height of Wol- 
sey's power. This man, then supreme minister, was housed 
luxuriously in his palace at Hampton Court ; the English people 
suffered from his exactions, and he was daily pointed at by 
church reformers, who inveighed against the "pomp and 
pride " of a high clergy, more ready to shear than feed their 
sheep. Then it was that John Skelton, who felt with the peo- 
ple, poured upon Wolsey from the voice of one the wrath of 
man3 T . In his poem of "Speak, Parrot," he uttered satire 
through a medle} r of apt sayings, jumbled together and pleas- 
antly blended with scraps from the parrot's feast of languages. 
The parrot appeared frequently as a court bird, in the Euro- 
pean literature of these times ; and although parrots had been 
brought into Europe by the followers of Alexander the Great 
many centuries before, their diffusion in the earlier } T ears of 
the sixteenth centuiy was due to the followers of Columbus, 
for it was one of the smaller results of the discovery of the 
New World. Skelton's Parrot was g&yly painted as a ladies' 
pet, and a philologist who picked up phrases in all tongues, 
and also, as he sak 1 



156 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

"Such shredis of sentence, strowed in the shop 
Of auncyent Aristippus and such other mo 
I gader tbgyther and close in my crop." 

Whatever else may be obscure in his whimsically disjointed 
oracles, it is clear that he meant Henry VIII. and Wolsey by 
the dogs Bo-ho and Hough-ho (Bow-wow and Wow-wow), when 
he said : 

" Bo-ho doth bark well, but Hough-ho he ruleth the ring; 
From Scarpary to Tartary renown therein doth spring, 
With, He said, and We said, I wot now what I wot, 
Quod magnus est dominus Judas Scarioth. ,, 

Elsewhere Wolsey was he who makes men to jumble, to stum- 
ble, to tumble down like fools, to lower, to drop, to kneel, to 
stoop, and to play couch-quail. " He earrieth a king in his 
sleeve, if all the world fail." Since Deucalion's flood, spoke 
the Parrot, there were never seen " so many noble bodies under 
one daw's head ; so man}' thieves hanged and thieves never the 
less ; so much prisonment for matters not worth an haw ; so 
bold a bragging butcher, and flesh sold so dear ; so many 
plucked partridges, and so fat quails ; so mangy a mastiff cur 
the great greyhound's peer ; so fat a maggot bred of a flesh- 
fly ; was never such a filthy Gorgon, nor such an epicure, since 
Deucalion's flood I make thee fast and sure." 

The second of his great satires is " Why Come ye Not to 
Court ? " in which the same public scorn of Wolsey is poured 
forth in Skelton's own verse ; a form of verse that was itself 
popular, — earnest, whimsical, with torrents of rhyme added to 
short lines kindred in accent and alliteration to the old national 
form of verse. 

All was wrong in the land; the English nobles were extinguished 
under the red hat. " Our barons be so bold, into a mouse-hole they 
would run away and creep, like a mayny of sheep; dare not look out at 
door, for dread of the mastiff cur, for dread of the butcher's dog would 
worry them like an hog." "I pray God save the king," says Skelton, 
"wherever he go or ride, I pray God be his guide." But "once yet 
again of you I would frayne (ask), Why come ye not to Court ? To 
which court ? To the King's Court, or to Hampton Court ? Nay, to the 
King's Court: the King's Court should have the excellence. But Hamp- 
ton Court hath the pre-eminence, and Yorke's Place with my lordes 
grace, to whose magnificence is all the confluence, suits, and supplica- 



To A.D. 1550.] JOHN SKELTON. 157 

tions, embassades of all nations. A straw for law, it shall be as he will. 
He regardeth lordes no more than potshordes; he is in such elation of 
his exaltation, and the supportation of our sovereign lord, that, God to 
record, he ruleth all at will without reason or skill. Howbeit the pri- 
mordial of his wretched original, and his base progeny, and his greasy- 
genealogy, he came of the sang-royal that was cast out of a butcher's 
stall." In more than twelve hundred of such short lines Skelton's 
""Why Come ye Not to Court?" poured out the anger of the people 
against Wolsey: 

"He maketh so proude preterm 
That in his equipolens 
He jugyth him equivalent 
With God omnipotent: 
But yet heware the rod, 
And the stroke of God." 

Skelton felt deeply, or he could not, even with the king's secret favor, 
have braved Wolsey in his day of power with so bold a satire. In this 
poem he painted the condition of the court. 

There was yet a third great satire, his " Colin Clout," which 
also denounced Wolsey, but of which the main purpose was to 
paint the condition of the country. Colin Clout represented in 
his poem the poor Englishman of the day, rustic or town-bred. 
The name blends the two forms of life : Colin is from " colonns " 
(tiller of the soil), whence clown; Clout, or Patch, sign of a 
sedentary calling, stands for the town mechanic, such as Bot- 
tom the Weaver, and his " crew of patches, base mechanicals." 
In Skeltonic verses, about equal in number to those of " Why 
Come ye Not to Court? " Colin Clout uttered his simple thought 
upon the troubles of the church, and all the evil that had come 
of the corruption of the bishops and high-churchmen. "That 
the people talk this, somewhat there is amiss," said Skelton. 
In this poem the reference to Wolsey was only incidental, and 
the desire was to sustain the church by showing what reform 
of discipline it needed if it was to " let Colin Clout have none 
manner of cause to moan." W r hile bishops' mules eat gold, 
" their neighbors die for meat." Heresies multiply : 

" Men hurt their souls. 
Alas, for Goddes will, 
Why sit ye, prelates, still, 
And suffer all this ill ? 
Ye bishops of estates 
Should open the broad gates 



158 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

Of your' spiritual charge 
And come forth at large, 
Like lanterns of light, 
In the people's sight, 
In pulpits awtentyke 
For the weal publyke 
Of priesthood in this case." 

Colin Clout closed his rhyming with a praj'er to Christ : 

" Such grace that He us send 
To rectify and amend 
Things that are amiss 
When that His pleasure is. Amen." 

Among Skelton's other poems two have yet to be named. 
One of these was a coarse humorous piece upon the brewing or 
" Tunnyng of Elynour Rumnryng," who kept an ale-house on a 
hill by Leatherhead, and became known to the courtiers of 
Henry VIII. when the court was at Nonsuch, about six miles 
off. The other poem was a morality play called ' ' Magnifi- 
cence." 

2. For the next three poets of power in English literature, 
we pass from England to Scotland ; and the first and greatest 
of these, William Dunbar, was an exact contemporary of 
Skelton. He was born at Lothian about the year 1460 ; and 
took his degree in arts at St. Andrews, in 1479. For a time 
he was a Franciscan or Grey Friar, and preached in England 
and in Picardy. In 1491 he was one of an embassy to France, 
a lettered priest acting as secretaiy under the Earl of Bothwell. 
After this he was abroad for some years in the King of Scot- 
land's service, and then returned home and resided at the court 
of James IV., having a small pension of ten pounds Scots. 
He died in Scotland about 1530. 

Dunbar was a small man, and was jested at in controversy 
as a dwarf. On one occasion, he seems to have accepted the 
degrading task of engaging in a word-battle with a fellow-poet, 
Walter Kennedy, for the amusement of lookers-on. The con- 
test is commemorated in "The Fbyting of Dunbar and Ken- 
ned3\" But such work is altogether pitiful, and was unworthy 
to express the humanity and the noble genius of a great poet 
like William Dunbar, whom both Sir Walter Scott and George 



ToA.D. 1550.] WILLIAM DUNBAR. 159 

Ellis placed 'at the head of Scottish poets. In the writings 
of Dunbar humor abounded, but it was the humor of a man 
essentially earnest. No poet from Chaucer till his own time 
equalled Dunbar in the range of genius. He could pass from 
broad jest to a pathos truer for its homeliness ; he had a play 
of fane}' reaching to the nobler heights of thought, a delicacy 
joined with a terse vigor of expression in short poems that 
put the grace of God into their worldly wisdom. 

Of Dunbar's principal poems, the first is " The Golden 
Terge," written, probabl}', before the beginning of the six- 
teenth century. It is in stanzas of nine ten-s}'llabled lines, 
forming a peculiar measure allied to that of the balade, each 
stanza having a musical cadence of two rhymes thus interlaced, 
— aabaabbab. 

This poem also begins with the conventional May morning. The poet 
rose with the sun, saw the dew on the flowers, heard the songs of the 
birds, while a brook rushed, over pebbles and little waterfalls, among the 
bushes. The sound of the stream and song of the birds caused him to 
sleep on the flowers. In dream he then saw the river, over which there 
came swiftly towards him a sail, white as blossom, on a mast of gold, 
bright as the sun. A hundred ladies in green kirtles landed from the 
ship. Among them were Nature and Queen Venus, Aurora, Flora, and 
many more. May walked up and down in the garden between her sis- 
ters April and June, and Nature gave her a rich, painted gown. The 
ladies saluted Flora, and sang of love. Cupid and Mars, Saturn, Mer- 
cury, and other gods, were there, also playing and singing, all arrayed in 
green. The poet crept through the leaves to draw nearer, was spied by 
love's queen, and arrested. Then the ladies let fall their green mantles, 
and were armed against him with bows, but looked too pleasant to be 
terrible. Dame Beauty came against him, followed by the damsels Fair 
Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasaunce, and Lusty Cheer. Then came 
Reason in plate and mail, as Mars armipotent, with the Golden Targe, 
or shield, to be his defender. Youth, Innocence, and other maids did 
no harm to the shield of Eeason. Sweet Womanhood, with all her good 
company, Nurture and Loveliness, Patience, Good Fame and Steadfast- 
ness, Benign Look, Mild Cheer, Soberness, and others, found their darts 
powerless against the Golden Targe. High Degree failed also; Estate 
and Dignity, Riches, and others, loosed against him in vain a cloud of 
arrows. Venus then brought in allegorical recruits, and re-arranged her 
forces. But reason, with the Shield of Gold, sustained the shock, till 
Presence threw a powder in his eyes that blinded him. Then Reason 
was jested at, and banished into the greenwood. The poet was wounded 



160 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. i 5 co 

nearly to the death, and in a moment was Dame Beauty's prisoner. Fair 
Calling smiled upon him; Cherishing fed him with fair words; Danger 
came to him. and delivered him to Heaviness. But then the wind began 
to blow, and all, flying to the ship, departed. As they went they fij - ". 
guns, by which the poet was awakened to the renewed sense of the fresh 
May morning. This kind of invention is as old as "The Romaunt of 
the Rose," and Dunbar took it from Chaucer. Though Chaucer had 
been dead a hundred years, no poet had yet succeeded to his throne. 
The land was still "full filled with his songs." G-ower and Lydgate 
were still named after him in courtly verse as the two other chief poets 
of the past: but of Chaucer men thought as Dunbar wrote in one of Lhe 
closing stanzas of his " Golden Terge: " 

" O reverend Chaucer! rose of rhetoris all; 
As in our tongue ane flower imperial, 

That raise in Britain ever who. reads richt, 
Thou bears of makars the triumph riall ; 
Thy fresh enamellit termes eeli 

This matter could illuminat have full bricht : 

Was thou nocht of our English all the licht, 
Surmounting every tongue terrestrial 

A] s far as Mayes morrow does midnicht." 

In Dunbar's second great poem. "The Thistle and the 

Rose." he was still a follower of Chaucer, constructing his 
own work on a time-honored model. It was written in 1503, 
to celebrate the -marriage which took place that year between 
King James IV. of Scotland and Margaret Tudor, daughter of 
Henry VII. of England. It is essentially a court poem, in 
Chaucer "s stanza, and planned to a form that had already 
become traditional in Chaucer's time. 

Here, again, we have the May morning, and the poet sleeping in his 

bed. when Aurora looked in at his window, with a paie green face, and 
on her hand a lark, whose song bade lovers wake from slumber. Fresh 
May stood then before his bed. and bade the sluggard rise and write 
something in her honor. Why should he rise, he asked, for few birds 
sang, and May brought only cold and wind that caused him to forbear 
walking among her boughs '? She smiled, and yet bade him rise to keep 
his promise that he would describe " the rose of most pleasaunce." So 
she departed into a fair garden: and it seemed to him that he went 
hastily after her, among the flowers, under the bright sunrise, where 
the birds sang for comfort of the light. They sang Hail to the May. 
Hail to the Morning, Hail to Princess Nature, before whom birds, beasts, 
flowers, and herbs were about to appear. " s they had wont in May 
from year to year.'" and pay due reverence. First of the beasts came the 
Lion, whom Dunbar's description pleasantly associated with the lion on 



To A. D. 1550.] WILLIAM DUITBAR. 161 

the arms of Scotland. Nature, while crowning him, gave him a lesson 
in just rule. A like lesson she gave to the Eagle, when she crowned him 
King of Birds ; and to the Thistle, who personified King James of Scot- 
land, when she crowned him with ruby, and bade him defend all others 
in the field. Then came the poet's welcome of the Tudor Margaret, 
when Nature glorified her as the Rose, the freshest Queen of Flowers ; 
and the poem closed with a song of hail and welcome to her from 
the merle, the lark, the nightingale, and from the common voice of 
the small birds, who, by their shrill chorus, woke the poet from his 
dream. 

Thus far in Dunbar's work, we trace the tokens of his con- 
scious apprenticeship to Chaucer ; but in all his work after this 
point, we see proof that lie has fully mastered his craft, and 
that he utters what is within him in a manner of his own. 
With vigorous homeliness in poetiy, a certain coarseness was 
then often associated — coarseness which was not immoralit}^, 
but consisted in plain utterance of truths belonging to the 
grosser side of life. This was common in Dunbar's humorous 
poetry. It was used with noble purpose in his third great poem, 
— "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," written in 1507, a 
piece in which new life was given to the old forms of allegorical 
poetry by the genius of a master. On the festival night before 
Lent, Dunbar saw heaven and hell, in a trance ; and it seemed 
to him that Mahoun called for a dance among the fiends. As 
the Seven Deadly Sins joined in the dancing, the allegorical 
description of each one became vivid with intensit}' of life, and 
w r as realized to the imaginations of the people by a profound 
earnestness expressed with playful humor. This poem was 
followed by one purely humorous, which described another of 
the sports called for b} r Mahoun, "The Joust between the 
Tailor and the Soutar " (shoemaker). And this, again, was 
followed by an ironical "Amends to the Tailors and Soutars," 
with the refrain, "Tailors and soutars, blest be ye ! " which 
was 'but a new form of flyting. You tailors and soutars can 
shape anew a misfashioned man, cover with crafts a broken 
back, mend ill-made feet : 

" In erd ye kyth sic miracles here 
In heaven ye sail be sancts full clear, 
Though ye be knaves in this countrie: 
Tailors and soutars, blest be ye!" 



162 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

To the same 3 r ear, 1507, in which " The Dance of the Seven 
Deadly Sins" was written, belongs his "Lament for the 
Makars" (poets), written when the author lay dangerousry 
ill. It is in musical four-lined stanzas, each ending with the 
refrain, "Timor mortis conturbat me" ("The fear of death 
disquiets me "). Warm with religious feeling and a sense of 
human fellowship, speaking high thought in homely phrase, with 
a true poet's blending of pathos and good-humor, it bows to 
the supremac} T of death while Dunbar joins lament with kindly 
memories of poets who have died before him : 

" And he lias now ta'en last of aw 
Gude gentle Stobo. and Quintine Schaw, 
Of whom all wichtis has pitie : 
Timor mortis conturbat me. 

" Gude Maister Walter Kennedy 
In point of deid lies verily; 
Great ruth it were that so suld be: 
Timor mortis conturbat me. 

" Sen he has all my brether ta'en 
He will not let me live alane : 
On forse I maun his next prey be : 
Timor mortis conturbat me. 

" Sen for the death remeid is none, 
Best is that we for death dispone, 
After our death that live may we : 
Timor mortis conturbat me." 

3. G-avin Douglas, another Scottish poet, was somewhat 
3-ounger than Dunbar. He was born about the 3'ear 1474, son 
of that Archibald, Earl of Angus, who was known as Bell-the- 
Cat. He was educated in Scotland and in France ; he took 
holy orders, and in 1509 was made rector of Hawick ; after- 
ward, he became provost of St. Giles in Edinburgh. In 1513 
he was nominated b} T Queen Margaret as Archbishop of St. 
Andrews. He took possession of the archbishop's palace, and 
was besieged in it by one of the other claimants ; but a third 
claimant obtained the Pope's grant of the see, and Douglas 
yielded. The remaining disputants opposed armed folio wings 



To A. D. 1550.] GAVIN DOUGLAS. 163 

to one another in the cathedral, but came to a compromise. In 
1515 the bishopric of Dunkeld became vacant, and Queen and 
Pope both nominated Gavin Douglas to the see ; but he was 
accused of procuring bulls from Rome, and was made to feel 
the authority of his old rival at St. Andrews, who imprisoned 
him for about a year. He was released when the Duke of 
Albany became regent ; and he got his bishopric \>y David 
Beaton's mediation, although Andrew Steward did hold out 
against him, and fire on him from palace and cathedral. The 
new bishop carried his cathedral, like a fort, b}' force of arms, 
but without serious bloodshed. In 1521 the strife of parties 
compelled Gavin Douglas to take refuge in England. He was 
well received, and pensioned at the court of Henry VIII In 
Februaiy, 1522, he was in Scotland declared a traitor. The 
revenues of his see were sequestrated, and the Pope was ap- 
pealed to lest by chance there might be given to Douglas the 
archbishopric of St. Andrew's then again vacant. The office 
was given to some one else ; and in the same }'ear, 1522, 
Douglas died in London of the plague. 

As a poet, Douglas is chiefly remembered for his English 
version of the " iEneid ; " but he also wrote two original poems, 
"The Palace of Honor," and " King Hart." The former is 
a court poem dedicated to James IV. ; is in the measure 
adopted by Dunbar in ''The Golden Terge ; " and is an 
allegory imitated in the usual way from poems that remained 
in fashion. On a May morning the poet entered a garden, 
swooned, and dreamed of a procession of Minerva and her 
court, Diana and her followers, Venus and all her train, with 
the court of the Muses, to the Palace of Honor. The palace 
was built on a high slippery rock with many paths, and but one 
leading to the summit. After much detail, classical and alle- 
gorical, after seeing the Muses cull flowers of rhetoric, Gavin 
Douglas awoke, wrote a lay in praise of Honor, and dedicated 
his poem to the king. Stead}' maintenance of right and duty, 
which runs through the literature of our county, is here, no 
doubt. We find it also in Gavin Douglas's better poem of 
"King Hart," an allegory of life, the Heart personified as 
Man. 



164 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

It was in July, 1513, about two months before the battle of 
Flodden, in which the poet lost his two elder brothers, that he 
finished his complete " Translation of the JEneid" into heroic 
couplet. This is our earliest translation of the "JEneid," or 
of any Latin classic, into verse. It gave all the twelve books 
of Virgil, and joined to them a version of the supplementary 
thirteenth book added by Maphaeus Vegms, a pious and clever 
author, native of Lodi, who died a canon of St. Peter's at 
Rome, in 1458. Gavin Douglas showed himself a poet with 
fresh energy, not only in his translation, which has the strength 
of simplicitj", but also in original prologues that introduce the 
several books. He was ready also, even out of season, to mind 
his office as a clergyman, as when he translated the sybil into 
a nun who advised JEneas, the Trojan baron, to persevere in 
counting his beads. 

4. David Lindsay was born about 1490, and inherited from 
his father an estate called "The Mount," in Fifeshire. He 
was four years at the University of St. Andrews ; after study 
of books came, perhaps, study of men by travel ; but Lindsay 
was soon in service at the Scottish court. When, on the 12th 
of April, 1512, the prince who became James V. was born, on 
the same day David Lindsay, aged about twenty-two, was one 
of those appointed to attend upon him. That appointment 
gave direction to the whole after-life of the poet. He devoted 
himself to the young prince through his infkncy and childhood ; 
and when the latter, as James V., aged sixteen years, suc- 
ceeded in becoming his own master, Lindsay was by his side, 
and stood by him always as a faithful counsellor. In 1530 the 
poet was knighted, and made Lion King- at- Arms ; and during 
the remainder of his life, which is supposed to have lasted until 
1567, he bore a prominent part, in his sacred office as herald, 
in the chief transactions of the Scottish court, both at home 
and abroad ; and was especially active, both b} T his writings 
and by Ms personal influence, in bringing about the Reformation 
in Scotland. His fame in our time has been quickened b} T the 
glowing description of him in Marmion : 

" He was a man of middle age; 
In aspect manly, grave, and sage, 



To A. D. 1550.] DAVID LINDSAY. 165 

As on king's errand come; 
But in the glances of his eye, 
A penetrating, keen, and sly 

Expression found its home, 
The flash of that satiric rage, 
Which, bursting on the early stage, 
Branded the vices of the age, 

And broke the keys of Home. 



Still is thy name in high account. 

And still thy verse has charms, 
Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, 

Lord Lion King-at-Arms." 



Never had king a poet-friend who preached to him more in- 
dcfatigably than Lindsay preached to James V. He sought 
incessantly to use his genius as a poet and his influence as a 
friend, for the benefit alike of his king and his country. First, 
there was "Lindsay's Dream," the earliest of his longer works, 
written apparently in 1528, the first year of the king's independ- 
ent rule. It contains 1,134 lines, and is throughout in Chau- 
cer's stanza. In a prefatory epistle to the king, he reminded 
his master how 

" Quhen thou wes young, I bure ye in myne arm, 
Full tenderlie, tyll thou begouth to gang, 
And in thy bed oft happit thee full warme; " 

how he had been Ms playfellow in childhood, and had told him 
in his j'outh " of antique stories and deeds martial ; " but now, 
he said, with the support of the King of Glory, he would tell a 
story altogether new. He told, in a prologue of the usual 
fashion, how, after he had lain sleepless in bed, he rose and 
went out, on a January morning, to the seashore, there climbed 
into a little cave high in a rock, and sat with pen and paper, 
meaning rhyme. But instead of rhyming, he wrapped himself 
well up, and after a wakeful night, was lulled to sleep by the 
sound of the waves, which he had been comparing to this false 
world's instability. " Heir endis the proloug, and followis the 
dreme." 

In his dream, he was taken by a guide, Dame Remembrance, first to 
hell, and then to heaven; and on his return toward earth, he asked about 
Paradise, and passed, with a significant transition, from Paradise to 
Scotland. Scotland, at his request, was shown to him by Dame Kemem- 



166 MAXUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

brance, and when lie saw that it was a fair country, he says, " I did pro- 
pone ane lytill questioun : 

' Quhat is the cause our bounde's ben so bair? ' 

Quod I ; ' or quhate does mufe our miserie; 

Or quareof does proceed our pom-tie? "' 

Scotland had natural wealth, and a people both ingenious and strong to 
endure. Lindsay asked, therefore, to be told "the principal cause 
wherefore we are "so poor." The answer to this question brought him to 
the purpose of his poem, as a warning to James Y., now master of his 
realm. Remembrance said, "The fault is not — I dare well take on 
hand — nother in to the peple nor the land. The want is of justice, 
policy, and peace." "Why then," asked Lindsay, "do we want justice 
and policy more than they are wanted by France, Italy, or England?" 
" Quod sche: 'I fynd the fait in to the heid. For they in whom does lie 
our whole relief, I find them root and ground of all our grief.' " " The 
poverty of the nation comes," said Remembrance, "from the negligence 
and insolence of infatuate chiefs, 

" Hauand small ee unto the common weill, 
Bot to thare singulare proffect euerilk deill." 

As Lindsay and his guide thus talked, there came a lean and ragged 
man, with scrip on hip and pikestaff in his hand, as one who is leaving 
home. This was the well-being of Scotland, John the Common Weal. 
Few cared for him, he said, in Scotland ; the spiritual estate never paid 
heed to his complaint, and among the laity there was nought else but 
each man for himself; so John the Common Weal must leave the land. 
" But when will you come back again ? " asked Lindsay. 

" • That questionn, it sail be sone desydit,' 

Quod he : ' there sail na Scot have comfortying 
Off me, tyll that I see the countre gydit 

Be wysedome of ane gude auld prudent kyng, 

Quhilk sail delyte him maist, above all thyng, 
To put justice tyll executioun, 
And on Strang traitouris mak puneisioun. 

Als yit to the I say ane uther thyng : 
I se, rycht weill, that prouerbe is full trew : 

"Wo to the realme that hes ouer young ane kyng.' " 

Lindsay's next poem was "The Complaint," also addressed 
to the king, and written probably in 1529, the year of Skelton's 
death, soon after James escaped from thraldom. It is in 510 
lines of octosyllabic rhyme, and professed to complain, that, 
now the king was his own master, greed}' men sought and had 
gifts from him, while his old friend " Da Lyn " was overlooked. 
He again reminded the king of his own earl}' and affectionate 
devotion to him : 



To A. D. I550-] DAVID LINDSAY. 167 

"How as ane chapman beris his pack 
I bure thy grace upon my back, 
And sumtymes stridlingis on my nek, 
Dansand with money bend and bek; 
The first sillabis that thou did mute 
Was * Pa— Da— Lyn.' Upon the lute 
Then playit I twenty springis perqueir 
Quhilk was great plesour for to heir; 
Fra play thou leit me never rest, 
But ' Gynkertoun ' thou luffit ay best ; 
And ay, quhen thow come fra the scuel 
Then I behaffit to play the fule." 

In this poem, Lindsay chiefly recalled with strong censure the 
history of the "erection" of the young king at the age of 
twelve by new rulers, "for commoun wcill makand no cair," 
and what Lindsay regarded as the wilful endeavor of those who 
then possessed him to corrupt and cheat him by base flatteries 
and allurements to a self-indulgence that would make him 
weakly subject to their will. The prelates who then ruled 
should have shamed to take the name of spiritual priests : 

" For Esyas in to his wark 
Calles thame lyke doggis that can nocht bark, 
That callit ar preistis, and can nocht preche, 
Nor Christis law to the people teche. 
Geve for to preche bene thare professioun, 
Quhy sulde thay mell with court or sessioun, 
Except it war in spiritual! thyngis." 

There was discord among great lords, till suddenly the king 

escaped : 

' Then rais ane reik, or ever I wyste, 
The quhilk gart all thare bandes bryste : 
Than thay allone quhilk had the gyding, 
Thay could nocht keip thare feit frome slyding; 
Bot of thare lyffes thay had sic dreid, 
That thay war faine tyll trott over Tweid." 

John Upland was blithe, said Lindsay, to see order restored ; 
but it had yet to be restored in the spiritualty. The king was 
admonished, therefore, to have an eye to the clergy, and make 
their lives better conform to their vocation, make them preach 
earnestly, and leave their vain traditions, which deceived the 
simple sheep for whom Christ shed his blood, 



168 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

"As superstitious pylgramagis 
Prayand to gravin ymagis, 
Expres agaiuis the Lordis command." 

Sir David Lindsay has been rightly called the poet of the 
Scottish Reformation ; but the reformation sought by him in 
the most active years of his life was far more social than doc- 
trinal. He had bitter cause to direct the king's attention to the 
pride of prelates who, in the year of the king's escape from 
the hands of Angus, first lighted a mailyr fire in Scotland. It 
was rare in Scotland to hear an}' preaching, except from the 
Black and Gray Friars. George Crichton, who succeeded the 
scholar and poet, Gavin Douglas, as Bishop of Dunkeld, once 
thanked God that he knew neither the Old Testament nor the 
New, but only his breviary and his pontifical. For this he 
passed into a proverb with the people, who would say, " Ye are 
like the Bishop of Dunkeld, that knew neither the new law nor 
the old." But when Tyndal's New Testament was ready, 
traders from Leith, Dundee, and Montrose, smuggled copies of 
it into Scotland ; Lutheran opinions spread ; and on the 29th 
of February, 1528, young Patrick Hamilton, not twenty-five 
years old, born of a good Scottish house, an abbot and a 
scholar, who had learned to think in Paris and in German}', was 
burnt for his religion at St. Andrews. In the midst of the 
flames he was called upon by some spectator, if he still held to 
his faith, to give a last sign of his constancy. At once he raised 
three fingers of his half-burnt hand, and held them raised until 
he died. Each fagot kindled a new fire of zeal. "Gif ye burn 
more," said a friend to one of the bishops, " let them be burnt 
in the cellars, for the reik of Mr. Patrick Hamilton has infected 
as man}' as it did blow upon." Calvin was then only nineteen 
years old, John Knox but three and twenty. 

Lindsay's "Complaint" was followed, in 1530, by "The 
Testament of the Papingo," or Popinjay, in 1,183 lines of 
Chaucer's stanza, a Scottish " Speak, Parrot," In 1535, Lind- 
say produced in the play-field at Cupar the most interesting of 
his works, the morality-play called "A Satire of the Three 
Estates." In 1536, he wrote for the king two little pieces. 
One was in " Answer to the King's Fly ting," a playful warning 



To A. D. 1550.] DAVID LIXDSAY. 169 

answer to the king's attack on his strict preaching of con- 
tinence. The other was a "Complaint and Public Confession 
of the King's Old Hound, Bagsche." Within the next three 
or four years, he wrote "The Deploration of Queen Magda- 
lene ; " " The Jousting of James Watson and John Barbour ; " 
also a satire on the long trains worn by ladies, " Ane Suppli- 
catioun against Side Taillis ; " and " Kittie's Confession," an 
attack on the confessional. Its doctrine is : 

" To the great God omnipotent 
Confess thy sin, and sore repent, 
And trust in Christ, as writis Paul, 
Who shed His blood to save thy soul; 
For none can thee absolve but He, 
!Nor take away thy sin from thee." 

In 1546, he wrote a poem on the murder of Cardinal Beaton; 
at about the same time, also, his " History of Squire William 
Meldrum," — the best of his lighter strains ; and in 1553, he 
finished his last and longest work, and one supremely grave — 
"The Monarchic; a Dialogue betwixt Experience and a 
Courtier, of the Miserable Estate of the World." The first 
line of its Epistle to the Reader called it a " lytil quair of mater 
miserabyll." There was, alas, no king to dedicate it to ; but it 
was submitted to the rulers and priests, praying them to Chris- 
tianize the laws, and remember that Scotland suffered war, 
famine, and pestilence, for sin. The Word of God must be 
taught, and the people repent of sin, before their enemies could 
have no might against the Christian banner. He divided his 
poem into a prologue and four books. 

David Lindsa} T was a poet of the same national t} T pe as John 
Gower. He had not the artistic genius of Dunbar, as Gower 
had not the artistic genius of Chaucer ; but Gower and Lindsay 
had a like sense of God and duty, a depth of earnestness that 
was itself a power, a practical aim, and a directness in pursuit 
of it, that caused each in didactic poetry to " write the ills he 
saw." The points of difference are manifest; especially there 
was in Lindsa} T a vein of humor, which also belongs to the 
people whom he represented, but of which Gower seems to have 
had less than his share. 



170 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

5. A writer on English poetry, in 1589. says that in the latter 
end of Henry VIII. "s reign •• sprang up a new company of 
courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas TVvatt the elder, and 
Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains ; who. having 
travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately 
measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept 
out of the schools of Dante. Ariosto. and Petrarch, they greatly 
polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy" — 
i.e.. poetry in the language of the people — ••from that it 
had been before, and for that cause may justly be said to he the 
first reformers of our English metre and style." 

Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder was born in 1503. at Ailing- 
ton Castle, in Kent, son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who was high in 
the king's favor, and who died in 1538. Thomas Wyatt entered 
St. John's College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve: took his 
Bachelor of Arts degree at fifteen : and was Master of Arts at 
seventeen. He became a gentleman of the king's bedchamber, 
and married Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Brook of Cobham. 
In 1533. he was ewerer at the coronation of his friend. Anne 
Boleyn. In 1537 he was knighted. He was tall and hand- 
some : his friend Surrey praised his form as one where " force 
and beauty met." He was skilled in exercise of arms, spoke 
French, Italian, and Spanish, was apt at kindly repartee, played 
on the lute, and at the age of five and twenty had been hon- 
ored by Leland as the most accomplished poet of his time. The 
king found pleasure in his conversation. Soon after a short 
imprisonment in the Tower during the king's pleasure. Sir 
Thomas Wyatt was sent as ambassador to the Emperor Charles, 
in Spain, and did not obtain until April. 1539. the recall he 
wished for. He had to deal with the personal questions be- 
tween the two sovereigns arising out of the divorce of Queen 
Katherine : the position of her daughter, the Princess Mary : 
and the birth of Jane Seymonr's son. Edward, afterwards King 
Edward VI.. in the autumn of 1537. There was also the argu- 
ment of the King of England's next marriage after the death 
:' Jane Seymour. There was also the war between Charles V. 
and Francis I., closed by the Peace of Nice, in 1538, during 
Wyatt's tenure of office as English ambassador in Spain. 



ToA.D. 1550.] SIR THOMAS WY ATT. 171 

Wyatt followed the emperor, posted to England, was wise and 
active, but too good a man for diplomatic work in which he was 
not free to be true. 

From Spain, Wyatt wrote earnest letters to his son, on the 
model of Seneca's epistles. Here are a few sentences from 
them: "Make God and goodness your foundations. Make 
your examples of wise and honest men ; shoot at that mark. 
Be no mocker ; mocks follow them that delight therein. He 
shall be sure of shame that feeleth no grief in other men's 
shames. Have 3*0111* friends in a reverence ; and think unkind- 
ness to be the greatest offence, and least punished, among men ; 
but so much the more to be dread, for God is justicer upon that 
alone. ... If you will seem honest, be honest ; or else seem 
as you are." 

In 1540, Wyatt had returned to his home at Allington. In 
that year came the fall of Thomas Cromwell, and after this Sir 
Thomas Wyatt, who had been one of Cromwell's friends, was 
sent in the winter of 1540-41 to the Tower, charged with dis- 
respect to the king, and traitorous correspondence with Cardi- 
nal Pole. There he wrote : 

"Sighs are my food; my drink they are my tears; 

Clinking of fetters such music would crave; 
Stink and close air away my life wears; 

Innocency is all the hope I have. 
Rain, wind, or weather I judge by mine ears; 

Malice assaults that righteousness should have. 
Sure I am, Bryan, this wound shall heal again; 
But yet, alas! the scar shall still remain." 

About June, 1541, Wj^att was tried and acquitted. In July 
the king made some amends to him by a grant of lands in Lam- 
beth, and he showed him afterwards substantial kindness. Sir 
Thomas Wyatt went again to Allington, attended personally to 
the education of a nephew, wrote a rhymed •' Paraphrase of the 
Seven Penitential Psalms," with a prologue of his own before 
each of them, and wrote also, in terza rima, three noble satires, 
two imitated from Persius and Horace, and one freely trans- 
lated from the Italian. The first and second were addressed to 
his friend, John Poyntz, (1.) " of the mean and sure estate," — 



172 MANUAL (ft 'ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

a new elaboration from Horace (Sat. ii. 6) of the story of the 
town and country mouse: (2.) of the courtier's life, from the 
Italian of Alamanni; (3.) to Sir Francis Bryan, entitled, 
'• How to Use the Court, and Himself Therein.'' a paraphrase 
of a satire of Horace (Sat. ii. 5). wherein, following Horace 
closely and bitterly. Wyatt applied to court life the principles 
of Maechiavelli : 

" Use virtue as it goetli nowadays 

In word alone, to make thy language sweet. 
And of thy deed yet do not as thou says. 
Else, be thou sure, thou shalt be far unmeet 
To get thy bread." 

His second satire, a free translation from Alamanni. told his 

friend why he sought to fly the press of courts, and live at 

home : 

"My Poyntz, I cannot frame my tongue to feign — 

To cloke the truth for praise, without desait, 
Of tli em that lust all vices to retain. 

I cannot honour them that set their part 
With Venus and Bacchus all their life long: 

Nor hold my peace of them, although I smart. 
I cannot crouch or kneel to such a wrong. 

To worship them as God on earth alone 
That are like wolves these sely lambs among. 

I cannot with my words complain, and moan, 
And suffer nought; nor smart without complaint: 

Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone. 

I am not he that can allow the state 

Of high Caesar, and doom Cato to die, 
That by his death did scape out of the gate 

From Caesar's hands, if Livy doth not lie, 
And would not live where liberty was lost: 

So did his heart the commonweal apply.'' 

Iii these adaptations from Italian and Latin, Wyatt uncon- 
sciously was summing up his life towards its close. In the 
autumn of 15-42, Henry VIII. was plotting with Charles V. war 
against Francis I. Charles sent an ambassador to England. 
Sir Thomas Wyatt was ordered to meet him at Falmouth, and 
bring him to London. Wyatt rode fast in bad weather, was 
seized with a fever on his way, and died at Sherborne, only 



To A. D. 1550.] SIR THOMAS WYATT. 173 

thirty-nine years old. His friend, John Leland, published Latin 
li taeniae " (funeral songs) upon his death. His friend, the 
Earl of Surrey, then aged about twenty-five, mourned his loss 
in a little elegy, and drew his portrait, flattered, of course, but 
true to the main features, in a few stanzas, of which these are 
three : 

"A visage stern and mild; where both did grow 

Vice to contemn, in virtue to rejoice: 
Amid great storms, whom grace assured so, 

To live upright, and smile at Fortune's choice. 

"A tongue that served in foreign realms his king; 
"Whose courteous talk to virtue did inflame 
Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring 
Our English youth by travail unto fame. 

"A heart where dread was never so imprest 

To hide the thought that might the truth advance ; 
In neither fortune loft nor yet represt, 
To swell in wealth or yield unto mischance." 

Wyatt's songs and sonnets, balades, rondeaux, complaints, 
and other little poems, closel}' and delicately imitate, with 
great variety of music, the forms fashionable in his time among 
poets of Italy and France. His sonnets, accurate in their 
structure, are chiefly translated from Petrarch ; man}' of his epi- 
grams are borrowed from the " Strambotti " (fantastic conceits) 
of Serafino d'Aquila, a Neapolitan poet ; and his three satires 
are in imitation of the satires, in terza rima, of Alamanni, a 
Florentine poet. The longest of Wyatt's amatory odes were 
taken from two canzoni of Petrarch. With all this, there is 
evidence in Wyatt's poetry of strain for ingenuity of word and 
phrase, for the concetti or ingenious conceits which had been 
developed in Italian literature by imitators of Petrarch, and 
which had even begun to form a part of polite conversation in 
the chief Italian cities. W}~att is to be remembered as the 
introducer of the true sonnet into English literature. His 
friend and fellow-poet, the Earl of Surre}', is generally spoken 
of as sharing with him in this service ; but the credit of it is 
due especially to Wyatt, not only as the elder man and earlier 
writer, but as the one of the two who alone gave accurate 



174 MANUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

models of the structure of that form of poem. Surrey did not 
take the trouble to observe the rule of rhyming in the octave 
of two quatrains and the sestette of two terzettes which consti- 
tute the typical Italian sonnet : and his rhymes do not once ac- 
cord with the system from which Petrarch hard'.}" more than once 
departed, even in a slight degree. The true sonnet consists of 
two quatrains and two terzettes. In the two quatrains forming 
the first eight lines there are only two rlryrues, with their order 
fixed for the first quatrain, where it is a b b a, but not for the 
second. These quatrains open the subject. The expression 
of the thought for which the sonnet is written falls within the 
two terzettes : here vigor of expression is less cramped by 
restriction in the rhyming ; while there are but six lines there 
are three rhymes, and the}' may be arranged at the discretion 
of the poet, energy of expression being at its height in the last 
line. Although Surrey's sonnets are in fourteen lines, and 
closely imitate Petrarch's forms of thought, yet as to their 
mechanism they are all at fault. Wyatt studied the form of the 
verse before he imitated, and the true sonnet was introduced 
into our literature by him alone. 

6. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, born about 1517, was 
eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk. He was cupbearer to the 
king in 1526 ; and in 1533, when Wyatt, aged thirty, served as 
ewerer at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. the Earl of Surrey, 
aged about sixteen, carried one of the swords before the king. 
Early in 1532 he had been contracted in marrioge to the Lady 
Frances Vere, daughter to John, Earl of Oxford. He was mar- 
ried to her in 1535, at the age of about eighteen.- Early in 
1542, Queen Catherine Howard, a cousin of Surre}''s, whom 
the king married within a fortnight after his divorce from Anne 
of Cleves, was executed in the Tower ; but on the following St. 
George's Day, Surrey was made a Knight of the Garter. In 
July of the same year, the Earl of Surrey was imprisoned in the 
Fleet for seeking fight with a gentleman of Middlesex, an 
offence which he admitted, and ascribed to " the fury of reck- 
less youth." He was released early in August, and crossed the 
border with his father, who had command of that expedition 
against Scotland which clouded with disaster the last hours of 
the Scottish James V. 



To A. D. 1550.] EARL OF SURREY. 175 

In 1543, after his return from that expedition, Surrey was 
summoned before the Privy Council on a charge laid against 
him by the ma3'or, recorder, and corporation of London, for 
'going about the streets at midnight in unseemly manner, with 
two companions, breaking windows of the citizens with stone- 
ibows. He pleaded guilty, and was sent to the Fleet Prison. 
There he wrote a whimsical little " Satire against the Citizens 
of London,'* arguing that his object was to warn them of their 
sins, and, since preaching failed, 

*' By unknown means it liked me 
My hidden burthen to express, 
Whereby it might appear to thee 

That secret sin bath secret spite; 
From justice' rod no fault is free, 

But that all such as work unright 
In most quiet are next ill rest: 

In secret silence of tbe night 
This made me with a reckless breast 
To wake thy sluggards with my bow.' , 

After a sufficient penance in the Fleet, he was during the fol- 
lowing two }*ears much engaged in militaiy service on the Con- 
tinent ; finalby, on the 12th of December, 1546, both he and his 
father were arrested, and sent, one b}* land, the other by water, 
to the Tower. They were of rojal blood, and could be ruined 
easily b} 7 the suggestion to King Heniy of any shadow of sus- 
picion that after his death they might aspire to the throne during 
the minority of his son Edward. Mainly upon a question of the 
royal quartering in his arms, as he had borne them for 3-ears 
with assent of the heralds, the Earl of Surrey was condemned 
to death as a traitor. His death-warrant was nearby the last 
signed by Henry VIII. ; signed with a stamp, since the dying 
king was himself become unable to write. Surrey was but 
thirty jxars old when he was beheaded on Tower Hill, on the 
21st of Januaiy, 1547, and the king died within a week, leaving 
the Duke of Norfolk's death-warrant unsigned. 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was impetuous and lively, 
less inclined than Sir Thomas Wyatt to side with the church 
reformers, but liberal of mind, bold, frank, incapable of subter- 
fuge or falsehood. His ' ' Paraphrases ' ' of the first five chapters 



176 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

of Ecclesiastes, and of the eighth, fifty-fifth, seventy-third, and 
eight}*- eighth Psalms, show the religious side of his English 
character. The paraphrases of the Psalms were made, as a 
little poem tells, when justice had impressed him with some 
error of his reckless youth, and 

" Began to work despair of liberty, 
Had not David the perfect warrior taught 
That of my fault thus pardon should be sought." 

Surrey's complaints, sonnets, and other poems in the Italian 
manner, all of love, are more various in their interest but less 
various in their music than those of Wyatt, and contain a few 
touches of mirth, as in the pleasant poem of -- A Careless Man 
Scorning and Describing the Subtle Usage of Women towards 
their Lovers," which ends thus : 

" Lord! what abuse is this; who can such women praise, 
That for their glory do devise to use such crafty ways ? 
I that among the rest do sit and mark the row, 
Find that in her is greater craft than is in twenty mo' ; 
Whose tender years, alas! with wiles so well are sped, 
What will she do when hoary hairs are powdered in her head ? " 

Surrey's special distinction in our literature is as the intro- 
ducer of English blank verse. He translated two books of 
the "iEneid," the second and fourth, into ten-syllabled lines 
of metre without rhyme, and this experiment was founded upon 
one of the new fashions in Italian literature. The taste for 
unrhymed verses, called " versi sciolti " (untied or free verses) 
was new even in Italy. In Tuscan literature, unrhymed verse 
existed, indeed, at the outset. It has been said that the prose 
of Boccaccio in the "Decameron " was largely intermixed with 
"versi sciolti,^' not distinguished from prose in the writing, or 
afterwards in the printing. But the Tuscans had almost ceased 
to use it, when, at the beginning of the sixteenth centuiy, it 
re-appeared with the new birth of the drama. It was used by 
Ariosto in his comedies ; by Trissino, in his tragedy of " So- 
fonisba ; " by Alamanni, in his elegies ; and particularly by the 
Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, in his version of the same two 
books of Virgil that were translated by Surrey. 

All this was known to Surrey, as a reader of the best Italian 



ToA.D. 1550.] ALEXANDER BARCLAY. 177 

literature of his time. In his translation there are passages 
which seem to show that he was acquainted with Gavin Douglas's 
version of the " JEneid " into heroic couplet, although that 
work was not printed till 1553. Nor were airy of the poems 
of Wyatt or Surrey printed before the death of Henry VIII. 
They were handed about and read in written copies. The first 
collection of them in print was made, we shall find, with verse 
of other poets of less mark, in 1557. 

7. We have now to pay some attention to the poets of less 
note, who belong to the first half of the sixteenth century. 

One of these. Alexander Barclay, whose place and date 
of birth are unknown, was of Oriel College, Oxford. After 
leaving college he travelled abroad, and then became one of the 
priests of the College of St. Mary Ottery, in Devonshire. He 
was afterwards a Benedictine monk of Ely, then among the 
Franciscans of Canterbury. In 1546 he obtained the livings of 
Baddow Magna, in Essex, and of Wokey, in Somersetshire ; 
and he had also the living of All Saints, in Lombaid Street, 
when he died, an old man, at Croydon, in 1552. He translated 
from some of the best authors of the Continent ; and the most 
famous of his translations was that of Sebastian Brandt's ' k Nar- 
renschiff," done into Chaucer's stanza, with an occasional vari- 
ation, and published in 1508, with some additional home-thrusts 
of his own, as Barclay's " Ship of Fools." Brandt called his 
book " The Ship of Fools " because no cart or coach was big 
enough to hold them all. The ship once read}', there was a 
great thronging for berths in her ; but nobody was admitted 
who had sense enough to call himself a fool. Whoever set up 
for a wit was welcome. One hundred and thirteen forms of 
folly were at last entered, with Brandt himself for their leader, 
as the Bookish Fool, who had man}- books, and was continually 
buying others, which he neither read nor understood. Various 
forms of human foil}', among misers and spendthrifts, laborers, 
gamblers, beggars, huntsmen, cooks, etc., were passed in good- 
humored satirical review, with incidental bits of counsel upon 
the training of children and other subjects. The book was 
rhymed with homely vigor, and man}' a proverbial phrase in the 
Alsatian dialect ; it had, therefore, wide currency as a picture 



178 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A ; D. 1500 

of manners, and a wholesome satire on the follies of the da}-. 
It went through many editions ; was translated into French in 
1497 ; and, while still in the first flush of its fame, was also 
translated into English as " The Ship of Fools " by Alexander 
Barclay, then signing himself priest and chaplain in the College 
of St. Mary Ottery. 

Other writings of Barclay's are his " Egloges," being moral 
and satirical rather than bucolic ; and ' ' A K yglit Frutefnl 
Treaty se intituled the Mirror of Good Maners," being translated 
from a Latin poem by Mancini. 

8. Another English poet of the reign of Henry VII. was 
Stephen Hawes, a Suffolk man. Like Barelay, he was edu- 
cated at Oxford, and then travelled. He was well read in the 
poets of England, France, and Italy ; could repeat much of the 
verse of Lydgate, whom he called especially his master ; and, 
perhaps for his good knowledge of French, was made by Henry 
VII. groom of the privy chamber. Like Barcla} T , Stephen 
Hawes was a poet without independent genius, a clever man who 
took delight in literature, and was active with his pen. In 1500 
his " Temple of fa-lass," an imitation of Chaucer's ''House of 
Fame," was printed by Wynken de Worde. His chief work, 
finished in 1506, was "The Pastime of Pleasure; or, the His- 
tory of Graund Amoure and La Bel Pucell : containing the 
Knowledge of the Seven Sciences and the Course of Man's 
Life in this World. Invented by Stephen Hawes, groom of 
King Henry VII. his chamber." It is an allegory of the old 
form, chiefly in Chaucer's stanza. 

Among the other books by Stephen Hawes was a " Conver- 
sion of Swearers," printed in 1509. He wrote also inverse, 
" A Joyful Meditation of All England," on the coronation of 
King Henry VIII. 

9. William Roy, a Minorite friar educated at Cambridge, 
who had aided Tyndal in his translation of the New Testament, 
published at Strasburg, in 1528, a satire in verse known as 
"The Burying of the Mass," with "Rede me and be not 
wroth " for the first words upon its titlepagc, and a woodcut 
of a satirical shield of arms with two fiends as supporters, for 
Wolsey, who is styled " the vile butcher's son " and " the 



To A. D. 1550.] THE MORALITY-PLAY. 179 

proud cardinal." It contains axes to signify cruelty, bulls' 
heads for sturdy furiousness, a club for tyramry, and in the 
centre a figure described as 

" The mastiff cur bred in Ipswich town 
Gnawing with his teeth a kinges crown." 

The arms have this couplet above thern, signifying Wolse3 r, s 

pride : 

" I will ascend, making my state so high 
That my pompous honor shall never die; " 

and these below : 

" O caitiff, when thou thinkcst least of all, 
With confusion thou shalt have a fall." 

10. Near the middle of the sixteenth century, the Scottish 
reformers completed "A Compendious Book of Godly and 
Spiritual Songs, collected out of sundrje parts of Scripture, 
with sundrie of other ballates changed out of prophaine sangis," 
and set the best of the gay tunes to new words, breathing love 
of God or defiance of the Pope, in this fashion : 

" The paip, that pagane full of pryd, 

Hee lies us blinded lang; 
For where the blind the blind doe gyde, 

No wonder both goe wrang. 
Of all iniquitie, 

Like prince and king, hee led the ring. 
Hay trix, trim goe trix, under the greenwode tree." 

11. We have already traced the introduction of miraele- 
plays, first in Latin, then in English. We must now attend 
to a new kind of play called the "Morality-Play," first per- 
formed in England during the first half of the fifteenth century, 
but not rendered thoroughl}' popular there until the period now 
under consideration. 

The moralit}'-play does not represent a transition from the 
miracle-play to the true drama. Miracle-plays remained mira- 
cle-plays, and were still acted. The moralit} T -play was simply 
an additional form of dramatic writing and acting. Its pecul- 
iarity is this ; while the characters in the miracle-play are real 
persons, as God, Angels, Satan, Adam, Eve, Noah, Peter, and 
so forth, the characters in the morality-play are allegorical per- 
sons, — that is, moral qualities personified, — as Faith, Hope, 
Charity, Conceit, Sober Sadness, Magnificence, and so forth. 



180 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1500 

The best examples of the morale-play belong to the reign 
of Henry VIII., and are the " Magnificence " by John Skelton, 
and "A Satire of the Three Estates" by Sir David Lindsay. 
In those days, morality-plays were planned b}' men who sought 
the reformation of abuses ; the} r helped them to express or form 
opinions of the people. Their personification of the virtues and 
vices in action could be used for an appeal to the people on 
great public questions in debate among them. 

12. Of the two morality-pla3 T s just mentioned as the best of 
their kind, that by Skelton is in verse both humorous and 
earnest. It showed how Felicity argued with Liberty, who 
was over-impatient of restraint ; how Measure, entering, set 
forth that ' ' Liberty without Measure proveth a thing of 
nought ; ' ' how wealthful Felicity and Liberty allowed Measure 
to guide them, and resolved that 

"There is no prince but he hath need of us three, — 
Wealth, with Measure, and pleasant Liberty." 

Magnificence then entered, and took them discreetly for com- 
panions, but was presently beguiled by the vice Fancy, and 
practised upon by Fancy himself, under the name of the virtue 
Largeness, and by the vices Counterfeit Countenance, Crafty 
Conveyance, Cloaked Collusion, Courtly Abusion, and Folly, 
under the names of Good Demeanaunce, Surve} T ance, Sober 
Sadness, Pleasure, and Conceit. The} T separated Magnificence 
from Measure, Liberty, and Felicity ; then left him to be beaten 
down by the blows of Adversity. He was next visited by 
Poverty, mocked by the vices that betrayed him, and left to 
give entrance to Despair. - Upon Despair followed Mischief, 
and fallen Magnificence was about to slay himself, when Good 
Llope entering put to flight those tempters, arrested the sword, 
and told the sufferer that his physician is the Grace of God. 
Then came Redress and Sad Circumspection ; and finally, by 
help of Perseverance, he rose to a higher than his old estate, 
after he had been taught 

"How suddenly worldly wealth doth decay; 
How wisdom, through wantonness, vanisheth away; 
How none estate living of himself can be sure, 
For the wealth of this world cannot endure." 



To A.D. 1550.] NICHOLAS UDALL. 181 

13. Lindsay's morality-play, "A Satire of the Three Es- 
tates," is by far the more important. This was a public setting 
forth of the condition of the country, with distinct and practical 
suggestion of the reforms needed. On one occasion, in 1540, 
at the Feast of Epiphany, King James V. of Scotland had this 
pla}' acted at Linlithgow, before himself and his queen, and the 
whole council, temporal and spiritual. At the end of the piece 
James warned some of the bishops who were present, that, if 
the}' did not take heed, he would send some of the proudest of 
them to be dealt with by his uncle of England. 

14. The rise of the modern drama, however, was not from a 
modification either of the miracle-plan's, or of the morality- 
plays, but came, with the revival of letters, almost everywhere 
from imitation of the Latin dramatists. First, the}' were imita- 
tions actually written in Latin ; afterward, they were imitations 
written in the language of the people for whom they were 
intended. Such was the case with the rise of the drama in 
England ; and there the first example of true dramatic writing 
in English was a comedy. 

15. There can be no doubt that the first known English 
corned}', although not printed until 15G6, was produced in the 
latter part of the reign of Henry VIII. Its author was 
Nicholas Udall, born in Hampshire, in 1505 or 1506. In 
1520 he was admitted a scholar of Corpus Christi College, 
Oxford, where he took his degree of M.A. in 1534. He be- 
came in succession master of Eton School, vicar of Braintree, 
prebendary of Windsor, and master of Westminster School ; 
he wrote translations from Erasmus and Peter Martyr ; he was 
at one time very active as a preacher ; and he died in 1564. 

He seems to have had a strong fondness for the writing of 
plays. In 1532, he assisted in writing " The Pageant " exhib- 
ited by the mayor and citizens of London when Anne Boleyn 
entered the city after her marriage. Udall was at that time 
a schoolmaster. In 1533 he published, and dedicated to his 
boys, " Floures for Latin Spekynge," selected and gathered 
out of Terence, and the same translated into English. The 
selections were made from the first three comedies of Terence. 
In 1534, Udall, who was highly esteemed for his scholarship, 



182 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1500 

was made head master of Eton School ; and in 1538 appeared 
a newly-corrected edition of his " Flowers for Latin Speaking," 
enlarged from 110 to 192 pages. It was the custom at Eton 
for the boys to act at Christmas some Latin stage-play, chosen 
or written for them by the master. Among the writings as- 
cribed to Udall about the year 1540 were several Latin com- 
edies, and a tragedy on the Papacy, written probably to be 
acted by his scholars. When it occurred to him to write for 
his boys an English comedy, wherein, as its Prologue says, 

" All scurrility we utterly refuse, 
Avoiding such mirth wherein is abuse," 

and avowedly following Plautus and Terence, "which among 
the learned at this day bears the bell," he produced what is, as 
far as we know, the first English comedy. Its name is " Ralph 
Roister Doister," and it professed to be a wholesome jest against 
vain-glory. 

The name of this comedy is derived from its chief character, 
a swaggering simpleton, a feeble conceited fop of the da} r s of 
Henry VIII., who is played upon and lived upon by Matthew 
Merrygreek, a n.eedy humorist. The jest of the play was in 
the absurdities of Ralph's suit to Dame Christian Custance, " a 
widow with a thousand pound," already betrothed to a merchant, 
Gavin Goodluck, away at sea. The pla}^, in lively rhyming 
couplets, interspersed with a few merry songs, was written with 
so good a sense of the reverence due to bo3's that it may be 
read by boys of the present day. The incidents provided good 
matter for merry acting, with an occasional burst of active fun, 
as in a brisk battle lost by Ralph and his men to Custance and 
her women, armed with broomsticks. The corned j r showed also 
its origin in a schoolmaster, by including a good lesson on the 
importance of right pauses in reading. A love-letter sent b}' 
Ralph to Dame Christian Custance was read to her, with its 
sense reversed by putting the stops in the wrong places, thus : 

" Now by these presents I do you advertise 
That I am minded to marry you in no wise. 
For your goods and substance I could be content 
To take you as ye are. If ye mind to be my wife, 
Ye shall be assured for the time of my life 



To A. D. 1550.] THE MASQUE. 183 

I will keep ye right well from good raiment and fare; 

Ye shall not he kept but in sorrow and care. 

Ye shall in no wise live at your own liberty; 

Do and say what ye lust, ye shall never please me; 

But when ye are merry," I will be all sad ; 

When ye are sorry, I will be very glad; 

When ye seek your heart's ease, I will be unkind; 

At no time in me shall ye much gentleness find ; " 

and so forth, all reversible by change of punctuation. 

16. Early in the reign of Henry VIII. was introduced a splen- 
did and courtly dramatic entertainment, called the "Masque," 
which, a hundred years later, under Ben Jonson and Inigo 
Jones, reached great perfection, and an extraordinary favor 
among the nobility and royal family of England. 

Even so early as the reign of Edward III. a dramatic enter- 
tainment called a "Disguising" had formed part of the pleas- 
ures of the court. In a "Disguising," the performers wore 
merely peculiar costume; in a " Masque," besides that, they 
also covered the face. 

The Masque was introduced from Italy ; its characters were 
taken by lords and ladies ; and from the time of Hemy VIII. 
to that of Charles I., it was an important feature in court 
entertainments. The chronicler Edward Hall has recorded 
that, at Greenwich, in 1512, " on the da}* of the Epiphany at 
night, the king, with eleven others, was disguised after the 
manner of Italy, called a Masque, a thing not seen before in 
England ; they were apparelled in garments long and broad, 
wrought all with gold, with visors and caps of gold. And after 
the banquet done, these masquers came in with six gentlemen 
disguised in silk, bearing staff torches, and desired the ladies to 
dance ; some were content, and some refused ; and after the}* 
had danced and communed together, as the fashion of the 
Masque is, the}* took their leave, and departed." Holinshed has 
described a Masque at Greenwich in Henry VIII. 's time, with 
mechanical contrivances, and action in dumb show. A castle 
was built in the hall of the palace, with towers, gates, battle- 
ments, and mimic preparations for a siege. It was inscribed 
on the front '-Le Fortresse Dangereux." Six ladies, clothed 
in russet satin overlaid with leaves of gold, and with gold 



184 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. : = -.; 

coifs and caps, looked from the castle windows. The castle 
was so made that it could be moved about the hall for admira- 
tion by the company. Then entered the king with five knights 
in embroidered vestments, spangled and plaited with gold. 
The}' besieged the castle until the ladies surrendered, and came 
out to dance with them. The ladies then led the knights 
into the castle, which immediately vanished, and the company 
retired. 

17. Another fomi of entertainment, " after banquet do:;.' 
or between meat and the banquet or dessert, was the "Inter- 
lude." This was satire in dialogue, ingeniously written for the 
entertainment of the company, and spoken by persons who as- 
sumed different characters ; but there was no working out of a 
dramatic fable. This entertainment had long been popular in 
Spain, in Italy, and in France ; and in the latter country it had 
been freely used for political and social satire. 

In England it appears first to have come into vogue in the 
time of Henry VIII. , when John Heywood acquired consid- 
erable distinction as a writer of Interludes. He was born per- 
haps at North Minis, in Hertfordshire, where afterwards Lc : .- 
tainlv had a home. He was opposed to Lutheranism ; and his 
friendship for Sir Thomas More having brought him into the 
king's favor, he retained it by his wit. He remained at court 
when Edward VI. was king, and under Queen Mary, for whom, 
when a young princess, he had shown a particular respect : but 
on the accession of Elizabeth he went abroad, and died at Mech- 
lin, in 1565. Besides his Interludes, John Heywood wrote six 
hundred epigrams. 

Of the Interludes written by him and performed at the court 
of Henry VIII., two were printed in 1532: "The Play of 
Love ; or, a New and a very Mery Enterlude of all Maner 
"Weathers ; " and " A Mery Play between the Pardoner and the 
Frere, the Curate and Neybour Pratte." One published in 1535 
was called "Of Gentylnes and Nobylyte : a Dyaloge I :: 
the Marchaunt, the Knyght, and the Plowman, compiled in 
maner of an Enterlude, with divers Toys and Gestifi ;>:lded 
thereto to make Mery Pastyme and Disport." Of another, 
published without date, and called " The Foure P's : ■ 



To A.D. 1550.] JOHN HEYWOOD. 185 

Mery Entcrlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potecary, and a 
Pedlar," the jest was, that after each had shown his humors — 
and here Heywood, although firm to the old Church, wrote as 
contemptuously as Sir David Lindsay of the Pardoner's traffic 
— first rank was to be adjudged b}- the Pedlar to whichever of 
his three companions excelled in lying, since that was, in the 
way of business, common to all. The Palmer won with this : 

" And this I would ye should understand, 
I have seen women five hundred thousand; 
And oft with them have some time tarried. 
Yet in all places where I have been, 
Of all the women that I have seen, 
I never saw nor knew, in my conscience, 
Any one woman out of patience." 



Paet IV. 

MODERN ENGLISH 
1550 to the Present. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH 
CENTURY. 



LATIN-WRITERS. 



Sir John Cheke. 
Sir Thomas Smith. 
Matthew Parker. 



John Jewel. 
Gabriel Harvey. 
George Buchanan. 



TRANSLATORS, 



Thomas Phaer. 
Thomas Twyne. 
Arthur Golding. 
Arthur Brooke. 
"William Paynter. 
Sir Thomas North. 
Richard Stanihurst. 
Arthur Hall. 



Barnaby Googe. 
John Florio. 
Richard Carew. 
Edward Fairfax. 
Sir Henry Savile. 
Joshua Sylvester. 
William Whittingham. 



John Knox. 
John Fox. 
Stephen Gosson. 



RELIGIOUS WRITERS. 

Philip Stubbes. 



Richard Hooker. 



WRITERS OF SECULAR PROSE. 



Roger Ascham. 
John Lyly. 
Sir Philip Sidney. 
John Bale. 
"William Webbe. 
George Puttenham. 



POETS AND 



Thomas Tusser. 
Thomas Sackville. 
Thomas Grimald. 
Thomas Churchyard. 
George Turbervile. 
George Gascoigne. 
Edmund Spenser. ■+ 
Fulke Greville. 
George Whetstone. 
Thomas Watson. 
William Warner. 
Henry Constable. 



George Cavendish. 
Richard Grafton. 
John Stow. 
Ralph Holinshed. 
Richard Hakluyt. 



DRAMATISTS. 

Sir John Davies. 
Richard Edwards. 
Thomas Lodge. 
Anthony Munday. 
George Peele. 
John Lyly. 
Robert Greene. > 
Henry Chettle. 
Thomas Kyd. 
Thomas Nash. 
Christopher Marlowe. 



CHAPTER I. 

SECOND HALF OP THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: 
ENGLISH WRITERS OP LATIN; ENGLISH 
TRANSLATORS; WRITERS OF RELI- 
GIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

1. Approach of the Elizabethan Era in Literature. — 2. Classical Study. — 3. Writers 
of Books in Latin ; Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith. — 4. Other Writers 
in Latin. —5. George Buchanan. —6. The Translators from Greek, Latin, 
Italian, and French ; Phaer ; Twyne ; Golding ; Turberrile ; Brooke ; Paynter ; 
North; Stanihurst; Hall; Googe ; Florio ; Harington ; Carew; Fairfax; Sa- 
vile; Sylvester. — 7. Religious Writings; Whittingham ; the Geneva Bible; 
the Bishops' Bible. — 8. John Knox. — 9. John Fox. — 10. Stephen Gosson. — 
11. Philip Stubbes. — 12. Richard Hooker. 

1. In entering upon the second half of the sixteenth century, 
we approach the most powerful and brilliant era in English liter- 
ature. At the beginning of this period, the youthful Edward 
VI. was on the throne of England. He died in 1553, and was 
succeeded by his half-sister, Mary, who reigned until her death 
in 1558. Then began the illustrious reign of Elizabeth, who 
ruled England until 1603. The literary splendor of the Eliza- 
bethan era did not begin, however, until the latter part of her 
reign, and it lasted through the reign of her successor. Most 
of the men who made the greatness and glory of Elizabethan 
literature were not born until about the time that Elizabeth 
ascended the throne, or afterward. Thus, Raleigh was born in 
1552, Hooker, Lyly, and Spenser about 1553, Sidney^ in 1554, 
Chapman in 1557, Warner about 1558, Bacon in 1561, Daniel 
in 1562, Marlowe and Shakespeare in 1564, Middleton about 
1570, Ben Jonson about 1574, Beaumont about 1586, Fletcher 
in 1576, and Massinger in 1584. 

2. The great impulse given, during the previous hundred 
3~ears, to the stud}- of the ancient literatures, was still felt in 
many ways : — in the study of those literatures, not only by 
professional scholars, but by men and women of high rank \ in 

189 



190 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

the excessive use of the classic mythologies in fashionable en- 
tertainments, in painting, in tapestry, and even in ordinary 
conversation ; in the continued use of Latin in the writing of 
books ; in special honor paid to learned men ; and, finally, in 
the multitude of English translations, in prose and verse, from 
Latin and Greek. 

3. Two of the most famous scholars belonging to the earlier part of 
our present period are Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith. 
They were both born in 1514 ; both studied at Cambridge, Cheke at St. 
John's College, and Smith at Queen's; both became famous at the Uni- 
versity as students, and, while still young men, as teachers of Greek. 
They worked together as reformers of the method of pronunciation, and 
excited a warm controversy on the subject. Greek, as received into 
England from the teaching of the learned refugees, was pronounced 
after their fashion; /3 was pronounced like our v, e and at were pro- 
nounced alike, and y, t, v had the same sound. Cheke and Smith de- 
clared this to be a modern Greek corruption of the ancient language, 
and proposed to give each letter value. They began by partial use of 
their new system of pronunciation in the course of lectures. When this 
had provoked cuiestion, each appointed a day for the explanation of his 
views, and both won followers. Students of Cambridge then acted the 
"Plutus" of Aristophanes pronounced in the new manner, and, six 
years later, when Dr. Eatcliff tried the old way he was hissed. He ap- 
pealed to the Chancellor of the University. This was Stephen Gardiner, 
Bishop of "Winchester, who addressed to Cheke an admonition that con- 
ceded high respect to him as a scholar, but condemned the youthful 
fervor with which he was spreading heresy against the established form 
of Greek pronunciation among students of the University. Gardiner 
then exercised his authority as Chancellor by issuing, in 1542, an edict 
settling the true faith in Greek vowels and diphthongs as absolutely as 
King Henry VIII. settled it for his subjects in all other matters. Cheke 
held his own, and replied with a treatise, "De Pronuntiatione Linguae 
Griecav' which was published afterwards in 1555. Smith wrote also a 
sensible letter on- the subject, and the Chancellor's decrees were not 
obeyed. 

At the age of two and twenty, Cheke had published an English tract, 
called "A Eemedy for Sedition, wherein are contained many things 
concerning the true and loyal obeisance that Commons owe unto their 
Prince and Sovereign Lord the King." In later days his loyalty and his 
fame as a scholar caused him to be appointed tutor to Prince Edward. 
He was a great scholar himself, and a cause of scholarship in others who 
earned reputation and looked back to him with gratitude. He was 
knighted by King Edward, and had grants of land. He became also in 
this reign a privy councillor and secretary of state. Sir John Cheke 



To A . D . 1 600.] GEORGE B UCHANAX. 1 91 

drew force for the real work of life out of his studies. He was especially 
familiar with Demosthenes, and said that the study of him taught Eng- 
lishmen how to speak their minds. At the death of Edward VI., he was 
one of those who sought to secure the succession of Lady Jane Grey, 
lie was sent to the Tower, but for his learning his life was saved, and 
he was permitted to leave England. While abroad his estates were con- 
fiscated. He was seized by Philip at Brussels, and sent to England, 
where he escaped death by recantation. The queen then gave him 
means of life, but made life a torture by compelling him to sit on the 
bench at the judgment and condemnation of those heretics who did not 
faint in the trial of their faith. His age was but forty-three when he 
died, in September, 1557. He left many writings that have never been 
published; and those that he did publish are nearly all translations of 
Greek and of English into Latin. 

The later career of Sir Thomas Smith was more fortunate than that 
of his friend. He had been travelling among the universities of France 
and Italy towards the close of Henry VIII. 's reign, and took the doc- 
tor's degree ai Padua. After the accession of Edward VI., he was made 
provost of Eton ; in 1548 he was knighted. Sir Thomas Smith became, 
like his friend Sir John Cheke, a secretary of state under Edward, and 
he was employed as an ambassador. Under Mary, he was deprived of 
all his offices, but had for his learning a pension of a hundred pounds. 
On the accession of Elizabeth, he rose to great honors, as ambassador 
and statesman, succeeding Burleigh as secretary of state, in which capa- 
city he died in 1577. His principal publication was a Latin treatise, 
"De Republica Anglorum." 

4. Other writers of books in Latin are the following: — Archbishop 
Matthew Parker, who published, in 1572, "De Antiquitate Britan- 
nicse Ecclesiae;" John Fox, the martyrologist, who wrote Latin plays 
on Scriptural subjects; Bishop John Jewel, who published, in 1562, 
"Apologia Ecclesioe Anglicanae;" Gabriel Harvey, who published 
Latin poems entitled "Smithus," and " Gratulationes Waldenses;" 
Richard Stanihurst, who published, in 1584, "De Rebus in Hibernia 
Gestis Libri IV.," and, in 1587, a Latin life of St. Patrick; above all, 
the Scottish historian and poet George Buchanan. 

5. George Buchanan was born at Killearn, Lennoxshire, 
in 1506. His father died, leaving his mother almost destitute, 
with five bo}'s and three girls ; and George was sent by James 
Heriot, a brother of hers, to Paris for his education. There he 
already wrote much Latin verse. His uncle's death, two years 
afterwards, obliged him to come back without health or money. 
He made a campaign with French auxiliaries in sharp weather, 
lost health again, was in bed the rest of the winter, went to St. 
Andrews to study under old John Mair, w r ith whom he went to 



192 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

Paris. There he became Lutheran, was for two }*ears very poor, 
then for two years and a half he taught grammar at the College 
of St. Barbe. He was then in France as tutor and companion 
for five years to the young Earl of Cassillis, and went back with 
him to Scotland. He there acted as tutor to the king's natural 
son, James, afterwards Earl of Mora}'. But he attacked the 
monks in Latin satires, especially in his " Franciscanus " and 
" Fratres Fraterrimi," was denounced by Beaton, and compelled 
to leave Scotland again. He went to England ; but there, he 
says, he found Henry VIII. burning men of both parties, more 
intent on his own interests than on purity of religion. So being 
half at home in France — though Buchanan carried Scotland 
about with him wherever he went — he went to Paris, found 
his enemy Cardinal Beaton there also in his wa}-, and was in- 
vited by a learned Portuguese, Andrew Goveanus, who resided 
at Bordeaux, to teach there. Thus he became professor of the 
Humanities at Bordeaux, where he had Montaigne in his class, 
and where he wrote two Latin tragedies of his own, on 4l Jeph- 
thah" and "John the Baptist," and translated into Latin the 
" Medea " and " Alcestis " of Euripides. These were written, 
year by }'ear, as they were required — the translations first — 
to be acted, according to custom, by the students of Bordeaux. 
Goveanus was at last summoned to Portugal by his king, and 
invited to bring with him men learned in Greek and Latin, to 
join in the work of the newly-founded University of Coimbra. 
All Europe was involved in war. Buchanan was glad to find 
in Portugal a quiet corner. There he was very happ}', with 
bright associates, and his brother Patrick among them, till the 
death of Goveanus. A persecution then began, some teachers 
were imprisoned ; for a year and a half Buchanan was worried, 
and inquired into ; and then he was confined for a few months 
in a monasteiy. There he occupied himself b} T making his 
famous poetical paraphrase of the Psalms into Latin verse — 
" Paraphrasis Psalmorum Davidis poetica " — first published 
at Paris in 1564. When he left Portugal, Buchanan came first 
to England — it was in the time of Edward VI. — then he went 
to France ; then was called to Italy by Marshal cle Brissac, and 
was for five years with the marshal's son, sometimes in France, 



ToA.D. 1600.] GEORGE BUCHANAN. 193 

sometimes in Italy. During that time he made a special study 
of the religious controversies of the da}\ In 1566, at the age 
of fifty, Buchanan was made principal of St. Leonard's Col- 
lege, in the University of St. Andrews. In the earliest child- 
hood of James VI., Buchanan became his tutor. George 
Buchanan was the best Latin poet this countiy had produced. 
He would seek to instil scholarship and theolog}^ of the Re- 
formed Church into the boy whose father was murdered, and 
whose mother was in England. Mary had escaped from Loch- 
leven in 1568, nobles had gathered force to rally round her; 
they had been defeated at Langside by the Regent Moray, and 
the queen then fled across the border into Pmgland. There 
Elizabeth detained her. Mary's paily and her cause were the 
part}' and cause of Catholicism. The Scottish Reformers under 
Moray's regency acted with Protestant England, and fell into 
disrepute even of subserviency to England. The question of 
Mary's complicity in the murder of Darnle}' was in agitation at 
Elizabeth's court, and in the case against her a chief part was 
played by eight letters and some verses cut into lengths of 
fourteen lines, and called sonnets of hers, said to have been 
found on the 20th of June, 1567, in a casket that Bothwell 
left behind him in Edinburgh. Then came, in 1572, the 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, to deepen the sense of danger 
from Catholicism. Sentence of death was resolved by Eliza- 
beth's advisers upon Mary of Scotland, as a foremost cause of 
peril to the countiy. Elizabeth was not to be answerable for 
the act, but Mary was to be returned to Scotland with a secret 
understanding that she was returned for execution. Then it 
was that the Casket Letters were first published to the world. 
George Buchanan published anoirymously, as an enforcement of 
the charges against Queen Maiy, a Latin translation of the 
Casket Letters. 

During the last twelve or fourteen years of his life, Buchanan 
employed his mastery of Latin, and his knowledge of events, 
in writing a history of Scotland — " Rerum Scoticarum His- 
toria " — in twenty books. It connected with the past the 
life of his own day, gave unity to all, and placed at the head 
of it the sense of nationality. It was in his nature to care 



194 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

rather to mark the progress of a people than to celebrate the 
power of a chief. This was distinctly shown in a sort of 
Socratic dialogue, published by him in Latin, in 1579, on the 
law as it relates to government among the Scots — " Jus Regni 
apud Scotos " — which ends by replying to their neighbors who 
called the Scots seditious, " What is that to them? We make 
our tumults at our own peril. No people were ever less sedi- 
tious, or more moderate in their seditions. They contend much 
about laws, royal rights, and duties of administration ; not for 
destruction and hatred, but for love of country and defence of 
law." Buchanan's history was first published in 1582, the year 
of its author's death. 

6. This period is distinguished for the multitude of works 
translated into English, especially from Latin and Greek, but 
likewise from the modern languages. 

Thomas Fhaer, who was born at Kilgarran, in Pembrokeshire, stud- 
ied at Oxford and at Lincoln's Inn, became advocate for the marches of 
Wales, afterwards doctor of medicine at Oxford. In May, 1558, in the 
days of Philip and Mary, six months before Elizabeth's accession, there 
appeared, " The Seven First Books of the Eneidos of Virgil, converted 
in Englishe meter by Thos. Phaer, Esq., sollicitour to the King and 
Queenes Majesties, attending their honourable counsaile in the Marchies 
of Wales." He continued the work, and had begun the tenth book, when 
he died, in 1560, and was buried in Kilgarran Church. In 1562 there 
were published, dedicated to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, Phaer's 
"Nyne First Books of the Eneidos." The translation was completed 
with less ability by Thomas Twyne, a Canterbury man, practising as 
a physician at Lewes, and published in 1573. Phaer, who was a fair 
poet, wrote also on law and medicine. His "Virgil" is in fourteen- 
syllabled rhyming measure. 

The other chief translation from the Latin poets in the early part of 
Elizabeth's reign was Arthur Golding's "Ovid," also translated into 
fourteen-syllabled lines. Arthur Golding was a Londoner, of good 
family, and lived at the house of Sir William Cecil, in the Strand. He 
translated Justin's "History" in 1564, and "Caesar's Commentaries" 
in 1565, which was the year of the publication of "The Fyrst Fower 
Bookes of the Metamorphoses, owte of Latin into English metre, by 
Arthur Golding, gentleman." Ten years later, when Shakespeare was 
eleven years old, Arthur Golding published his complete translation of 
"The XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphoses," dedi- 
cated to Robert, Earl of Leicester. This was the book through which 
men read the "Metamorphoses" in English till the time of Charles I. 



To A.D. 1600.J RICHARD STANIHURST. 195 

In 1587, he published a translation of "Du Plessis Mornay on The Truth 
of Christianity." 

In 1567, George Turbervile published two translations — one of 
"The Heroical Epistles of Ovid," six of them translated into blank 
verse, and the others into four-lined stanzas; the other of the Latin 
Eclogues of Manluan, an Italian poet, who had died in 1516. He 
also made versions from the Italian, notably ten "Tragical Tales 
translated by Turbervile, in Time of his Troubles, out of sundrie 
Italians, with the Argument and L'Envoye to each Tale," published in 
157' i. 

From Italy, with French intervention, the story of "Romeo and 
Juliet" first came into English verse in 1562, two years before Shake- 
speare's birth, as " The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written 
first in Italian by Bandell, and now in English by Ar. Br.," that is, 
Arthur Brooke. Arthur Brooke took his poem from a French varia- 
tion on the story by Bamlello, himself altering and adding; and upon 
this tale as told by Arthur Brooke, Shakespeare afterwards founded his 
play. 

"William Paynter, clerk of the Office of Arms within the Tower 
of London, produced in 1566 the first volume of "The Palace of Pleas- 
ure," containing sixty novels translated from Boccaccio's "Decameron." 
In the following year he published, in a second volume, thirty-four more 
novels, partly taken from Bandello, whose tales first appeared at Lucca, 
in 1554. Among the novels included in Paynter's second volume was 
another English version of " Romeo and Juliet." 

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen years old, and Francis Bacon 
was eighteen, Sir Thomas North published his translation of "Plu- 
tarch's Lives." This was not from the original Greek, but from the 
delightful French translation of Plutarch, published in and after 1567 
by Jacques Amyot, who was in those days the prince of French trans- 
lators. Sir Thomas North was himself an active member of the English 
band of translators produced by the revival of letters. Among his other 
translations was, in 1570, one from the Italian version of a famous Ara- 
bian fable-book called "Calilah i Duuinah," as "The Morale Philoso- 
phic of Doni." But he is here named because it was chiefly in North's 
Plutarch that Shakespeare, as a playwright, learned his history of 
Rome. 

Richard Stanihurst, who has been mentioned already as the writer 
of an Irish chronicle in Latin, published at Leyden, in 1583, a transla- 
tion of the first four books of YirgiPs "iEneid" into English hexame- 
ters. A small war against rhyme was then going on in England; and 
Stanihurst's attempt at an English "Virgil" in Virgil's own measure 
was praised by those who encouraged the experiment, attacked by 
others. Had Virgil himself written in English in 1583, he would 
hardly have expressed Jupiter's kiss to his daughter by saying, as 
Stanihurst made him say, that he "bussed his pretty prating parrot," 



196 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

or written hexameters of this sort to describe Laocoon's throwing his 
spear at the great wooden horse : 

" 'My lief for an haulfpennie, Troians, 
Either heere ar couching soom troups of Greekish asemblie, 
Or to crush our bulwarcks this woorck is forged, al houses 
For to prie surmounting thee town : soom practis or oother 
Heere lurcks of coonning : trust not this treacherus ensigne ; 
And for a ful reckning, I like not barrel or herring; 
Thee Greeks bestowing their presents G-reekish I feare mee.' 
Thus said, he stout rested, with his chaapt staffe speedily running, 
Strong the steed he chargeth, thee planck ribs manfully riding. 
Then the iade, hit, shivered, thee vauts haulf shrillie rebounded 
With clush clash buzzing, with droomming clattered humming." 

The first attempt at a translation of Homer into English Alexandrine 
verse was begun in 1563, and published in 1581. This appeared in "Ten 
Books of Homer's Iliades." It was not translated from the Greek 
direct, but chiefly through the French version of Hugues Salel, by- 
Arthur Hall, of Grantham, a member of parliament. The fact that 
this is the first Englishing of Homer gives the book importance. 

Barnaby Googe, born about 1540, at Alvingham, and son of the 
Recorder of Lincoln, was a translator from the moderns. In 1560 he 
issued the first three books, and in 1565 all twelve books of an English 
version of the Italian Manzolli's satirical invective against the Papacy, 
"The Zodiac of Life." In 1570, Googe published a translation of 
another Latin invective, written by Thomas Kirchmeyer, which he 
called "The Popish Kingdome; or, Reigne of Antichrist." In 1577 he 
published a translation from the Latin of the " Four Bokes of Husband- 
rie," by Conrad Heresbach. He also translated from the Spanish; and 
a little volume of his own verse, "Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes," 
was issued in 1563. Googe died in 1594. 

A noted translator from the Italian and French was " Resolute 
John Florio" as he wrote himself. He was an active man of Italian 
descent, born in London in Henry VIII. 's reign, taught Italian and 
French at Oxford, and was in high repute at court. He published, in 
1578, "Florio his First Fruites; which yeelde familiar speech, merie 
Prouerbes, wittie sentences, and golden sayings. Also, a perfect Intro- 
duction to the Italian and English Tongues." In 1591 followed "Flo- 
rio's Second Frvtes. To which is annexed his Garden of Recreation, 
yeelding six thousand Italian Prouerbs." At the end of Elizabeth's 
reign, in 1603, appeared "The Essays of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, 
done into English by John Florio." Upon a copy of this book Shake- 
speare's autograph has been found, and Shakespeare's knowledge of 
Montaigne is shown in "The Tempest," where the ideal commonwealth 
of the old Lord Gonzalo (Act ii.sc. i.) corresponds closely, in word as 
well as in thought, with Florio's Montaigne. 

The Italian poet Ariosto had an English translator in Sir John Har- 
ington, who was born at Helston, near Bath, in 1561, was educated at 



To A.D. 1600.] ENGLISH BIBLES. 197 

Eton and Cambridge, and who published at the age of thirty, in 1591, 
"Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse." 

Tasso had in Elizabeth's reign two English translators. The first was 
Richard Carew, whose " Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recouerie of 
Hierusalem," appeared in 1594; the second was Edward Fairfax, whose 
translation appeared with the same titles in 1600. It is in the octave 
rhyme of the original, one of the most musical and poetical of all Eng- 
lish translations into verse. Fairfax was the second son of Sir Thomas 
Fairfax, of Denton, in Yorkshire. He lived as a retired scholar at New- 
haL in Knaresborongh Forest, and, later in life, educated with his own 
children those of his brother Ferdinand, Lord Fairfax. One of these 
nephews became famous as the Fairfax of the civil wars. Edward 
Fairfax himself lived into the reign of Charles I., and died in 1632. 

In 1581, Sir Henry Savile, who had given lessons to Queen Eliza- 
beth in Greek and mathematics, published at Oxford a translation of 
" The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba, Fower Bookes of the 
Histories of Cornelius Tacitus; The Life of Agricola." 

A French poet of the sixteenth century, Du Bartas, had extraordinary 
repute in England not only as a writer according to the ephemeral taste 
of the time, but also as a French Huguenot for his accord with the re- 
ligious feeling of the English people, and because his song was always 
upon sacred themes. In 1598, Joshua Sylvester, then thirty-five years 
old, translated into English the "Divine Weeks and Works" of Du 
Bartas. Sylvester had begun in 1590, by publishing a translation of the 
poem of Du Bartas upon the battle of Ivry, " A Canticle of the Victorie 
obtained by the French King Henrie the Fourth at Yvry. Translated 
by Josua Siluester, Marchant-aduenturer." He had added another 
piece to that in 1592. There had been other translators from the French 
poet. In 1584, Thomas Hudson had published at Edinburgh a transla- 
tion of his "History of Judith," made by command of James VI. An- 
other of these translators was William Lisle, of Wilbraham, who pub- 
lished a part of "The Second Week" of Du Bartas in 1596, dedicated 
to Lord Howard of Effingham, added the "Colonies" in 1598, and 
translated, in all, four books. Another of his translators, at the end of 
Elizabeth's reign and beginning of the reign of James in England, was 
Thomas Winter. 

7. All writings during this period were pervaded by the spirit 
of theological and religious discussion, which itself entered into 
the most secular thought and conversation of the age. Some 
writings, however, were avowedly theological and religious. 

At the head of these we ma}- properly place the two English 
versions of the Bible which were produced early in the reign of 
Elizabeth, and which remained during the rest of her life com- 
monly in use. These were the Geneva Bible, which appeared 



19S MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. ."A.D. 1550 

in 1560, and the Bishops' Bible, whivh apy :-are:l in 1 " b. "The 
Geneva Bible" was produced by the English congregation at 
Geneva during the reign of Mary, chief y at the cost 01 John 
Bodley. the father of >ir Thomas Bodley. In 1557 the New 
Testament, translated by "William Whittinghain. Calvin's 
brother-in-law, was hrst published. It was translated from the 
Greek text as pan lished 1 y Erasmus, and revised from manu- 
scripts collected by Genevan scholars. Calvin prefixed to it an 
■• Epistle declaring that Christ is the End of the Law." Whit- 
tingham then, with the aid of fellow-exiles. Gilby. Sampson. 
and others, turned to the Hebrew text. and. instead of coming 
to England after the death of Mary, these laborers remained 
at Geneva to complete their work. Hebrew scholarship bed 
advanced : and the Geneva Bible, completed in lobe 1 , four years 
before the birth of Shakespeare, was as faithful as its transla- 
tors could make it. Various reading- -ere given in the margin, 
and there were notes on points not only of history and geog- 
raphy, but also of doctrine, which distinctly bound this version 
to the religious school of Calvin, In the Geneva Bade ap- 
peared, for the first time, as a plan to secure fa eility of refer- 
ence, the now familiar division of the text into verses. This 
was the household Bible of those whom we may call — using the 
phrase in a broad sense — the Elizabethan Puritans. In the 
dedication of it to Queen Elizabeth, the zeal of the Genevan 
reformer- was not less harsh than that from which they them- 
selves had suffered in the reign of Mary. Elizabeth wa- re- 
minded how the noble Jos: as "put to death the false prophets 
and sorcerers, to perform the words of the law of God. . . . 
Yea. and in the days of King Asa. it was enacted that whosoever 
would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be slain, whether 
he were small or great, man or woman." 

In bbG. was published at London a translation of the Bible, 
made, under the birection of Arehrlshop Parker, by fifteen 
learned men. most of them bishops. Tin- translation, from the 
number of bishops who took part in it. and from the fact that it 
'came, for Elizabeth's reign, the authorize I version for church 
use. was known as "The Bishops' Bible." It put aside, for 
example. TyndaTs word " congregation," against which More 



To A.D. 1600.] JOHN KNOX. 199 

had contended, and which had remained in Cranmer's Bible, 
giving the word " Church," which Tyndal had avoided. But 
tendencies of thought are indicated by the fact, that, of eighty- 
five editions of the English Bible published in Elizabeth's reigu, 
sixty were of the Geneva version. 

8. John Knox was born in 1505, at Gifford, in East Lothian. 
He was educated in the grammar-school at Haddington, and in 
1522 matriculated in St. Andrews Universit}', which then had 
John Mair for its provost. He took priests' orders, but was 
drawn to the side of the reformers ; and became the friend 
and follower of George Wishart, a Scottish schoohnaster, who, 
about 153G, began to preach as a reformer. Wishart went to 
England and recanted, but, recovering more than his old bold- 
ness, came back to Scotland in 1543, and, though of gentle 
character, preached with intense enthusiasm. Thus he stirred 
among the people violent antagonism to the practices that he 
denounced, so that the}' wept over them in themselves, and 
raged at them in others. John Knox, to protect his beloved 
preacher, whose assassination had been once attempted, waited 
upon him, bearing a two-handed sword. Flesh and blood went 
for little in the growing heat of spiritual conflict. When Wish- 
art was seized as a heretic, Knox desired to share his fate ; 
"Nay," said Wishart, "return to your bairns" (pupils), 
" and God bless you. One is enough for a sacrifice." Wish- 
art's martyrdom, in March, 1546, witnessed b}' Beaton from his 
velvet cushions at a window of the Castle of St. Andrews, was 
followed in Ma}-, 1546, by the murder of Beaton. The next 
3 T ear, Knox's friends urged him to preach. He had renounced 
his priests' orders, and said he had no vocation ; but it was 
urged on him that eveiy congregation has an inherent right to 
call any qualified person to be its teacher. So Knox began his 
preaching. In August of the same }'ear, he was captured by 
the French, and remained for two 3'ears a prisoner in the French 
galleys. From 1549 to 1555, he was preaching in various parts 
of England and of the Continent, when, in the latter year, after 
a short visit to Scotland, he became the pastor of an English 
congregation at Geneva. There he worked with Calvin, who 
had become supreme, and made the city what Knox took to be 



200 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

" the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since 
the days of the Apostles." It was from Geneva, just before 
the accession of Elizabeth, that Knox issued, without his name, 
his ' ' First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regi- 
ment of TTomen." His wrath was against the rule of the three 
Marys, — Mary of Guise, queen-dowager and regent of Scotland, 
Mary Queen of Scots, and Queen Maiy of Eugland, and on be- 
half of " so man}* learned and men of grave judgment as this 
da}' by Jezebel are exiled." In his preface he said that men 
had offended " by error and ignorance, giving their suffrages, 
consent, and help to establish women in their kingdoms and em- 
pires, not understanding how abominable, odious, and detestable 
is all such usurped authority in the presence of God ; ' ' and he 
ended with this sentence: "My purpose is thrice to blow the 
trumpet in the same matter, if God so permit : twice I intend 
to do it without name, but at the last blast to take the blame 
upon myself, that all others ma}' be purged." After such pref- 
ace he began his book, a small quarto, about as big as a man's 
hand, with the assertion that "to promote a woman to bear 
rule, superiority, dominion, or empire, above any realm, nation, 
or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most 
contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and 
finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and jus- 
tice." Women are not worthy to rule. "I exempt," said 
Knox, " such as God, by singular prmlege, and for certain 
causes known only to himself, hath exempted from the common 
rank of women, and do speak of women as nature and experi- 
ence do this day declare them. Nature, I say, doth paint them 
further to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish ; and ex- 
perience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, 
and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment." "Let all 
men," he said at the end, " be advertised, for the trumpet hath 
once blown." Knox blew no other blast, and would have 
recalled this if he could, although he did state in advance that 
the argument of his " Second Blast " was well to proclaim how 
through one woman England had been betrayed to Spain, and 
Scotland to France through another. That the issuing of such 
a book should coincide in time with the accession of Queen 



To A.D. 1600.] JOHN FOX. 201 

Elizabeth was unlucky for the argument of the reformer. Knox 
had cut off retreat from his position. He might rank Elizabeth 
with Deborah ; bat he had refused to clothe even Deborah with 
civil authority, not doubting that she had " no such empire as 
our monsters claim." Moreover, he had pledged himself to 
two more blasts from the same trumpet ; and if his argument 
was good, the elevation of yet another woman to supremacy 
would make its enforcement only the more necessary. 

In 1559, Knox returned to Scotland, and began his career 
there as an aggressive and destructive religious reformer, and as 
a patriotic statesman. He died in 1572. His " Historic of 
the Reformation of Religioun within the Realme of Scotland " 
first appeared twelve years after his death, in 1584, published 
in Edinburgh, but printed in London, and afterwards partly 
suppressed in 1587 by the seizure and destruction of copies, at 
the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The whole grim 
energ}' of Knox's character animates this recital of events in 
which and for which he lived. 

9. In 1563, was published the book that has ever since been 
famous as "Fox's Book of Martyrs." The real title is as 
follows: "Acts and Monuments of these latter and perillous 
Da}-es, touching matters of the Church, wherein are compre- 
hended and described the great Persecutions and horrible 
Troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romishe 
Prelates, especiallye in this Realme of England and Scotlande, 
from the Yeare of our Lorde a Thousande unto the Tyme now 
present. Gathered and collected according to the true Copies 
and Wry tinges certificatorie, as wel of the Parties themselves 
that suffered, as also out of the Bishops' Registers which were 
the doers thereof, b}* John Foxe." To a right student the 
value of such a book is rather increased than lessened b} T the 
inevitable bias of a writer who recorded incidents that had for 
him a deep, real, present interest, and who had his own part 
in the passion of the controversy he describes. It vividly rep- 
resents one aspect of the strong life of the sixteenth century. 
The book, dedicated to the queen, was ordered to be set up in 
parish churches for the use of all the people, except in times 
of divine service. The author registered with controversial 



202 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

bitterness the pangs of martyrs, and believed all ill of the 
opponents of his faith. — putting into his book recklessly the 
most calumnious falsehoods. John Fox was born in 1517, at 
Boston, in Lincolnshire. He was educated at Brazenose Col- 
lege, Oxford, and became fellow of Magdalene. He wrote Latin 
plays on scriptural subjects before he devoted himself wholly to 
the great religious controversies of his day. Then he studied 
Hebrew, read the Greek and Latin Fathers, was accused in 1545 
of heresy, and was expelled from college. He next lived with 
Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford-on-Avon. as 
tutor to his children : then he came to London, and, after the 
execution of the Earl of Surrey, John Fox was employed as 
tutor to his children. At the beginning of Mary's reign Fox 
was protected by the Duke of Norfolk, but he presently escaped 
to Basle, where he lived as corrector of the press for the printer 
Oporinus, and resolved to write his Martvrology. At this he 
proceeded to work, writing it then in Latin. The first sketch 
was published in octavo in 1554. John Aylmer, and more 
particularly Edmund Grindal. also exiles, aided Fox with in- 
formation received out of England concerning the martyrs for 
their faith. At the accession of Elizabeth, Fox was in Basle 
with a wife and two children, poor, but with a more settled 
employment than he could afford immediately to leave. His 
friend Grindal went back to England, but Fox remained another 
year at Basle, and for a time suspended, as Grindal advised, 
the production of his enlarged history of troubles in the church, 
because new matter in abundance would now surely come to 
light. This enlarged book appeared, in its first Latin form, in 
folio, from the press of Oporinus, in August, 1559, and con- 
tained some facts that were omitted in the translations. In the 
following October, John Fox had returned to London, where 
he was housed by Aldgate at Christchurch, the manor-place of 
his old pupil the Duke of Xorfolk. From Aldgate he went 
every Monday to the printing-office of John Day. He held a 
prebend at Salisbmy. although he was opposed to the compro- 
mise with old forms in the ecclesiastical system of the church, 
and refused to subscribe to any thing but the Greek Testa- 
ment. He preached at Paul's Cross and elsewhere ; but his 



To A. D.i 6oo.] STEPHEN G OS SON. 203 

most important work was that done with John Da}*. Fox died 
in 1587. 

10. In the religious writings of this time, one finds man}' 
traces of the rising hostility of Puritanism towards social 
amusements, and especially towards the drama. An example of 
this is Stephen Gosson's " School of Abuse." The author, 
born in 1555, and a graduate of Oxford, came to London in 
1576, aged twenty-one, attached himself at once to the new- 
theatres, and wrote plays, which are now lost, — ''Catiline's 
Conspiracies ;'* " Captain Mario," a Coined}* ; " Praise at Part- 
ing," a Moral. Soon he was moved by the controversies of 
the time not only to abandon his new calling as a writer for 
the stage, but to join in attack upon the theatres. This he did 
in 1579, by publishing a short prose book called "The School 
of Abuse, containing a Pleasaunt Invective against Poets, 
Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such-like Caterpillers of a Com- 
monwelth ; setting up the Flagge of Defiance to their mischiev- 
ous exercise, and overthrowing their Bulwarkes, by Profane 
Writers, Naturall Reason, and Common Experience : a Dis- 
course as pleasaunt for Gentlemen that favour Learning, as 
profitable for all that wyll follow Vertue." This was entered 
at Stationers' Hall in Jul}*, and was dedicated to Philip Sidney. 
But Philip Sidney, we learn, was ill pleased with the dedication 
to him of a book that set out with an attack on poetry ; and 
Gosson's " School of Abuse " is believed to have prompted 
Sidney to the writing of his ''Apology for Poetiy. From the 
poets Gosson went on to the musicians, and then to the players. 
One passage in his attack upon them is worth notice. He said 
it might be urged that, whatever were the immoralities of ancient 
corned}', " the comedies that are exercised in our days are better 
sifted, they show no such bran." After comparing the immo- 
rality of the old plays with the morality of the new ones, he 
said, "Now are the abuses of the world revealed; every man 
in a play may see his own faults, and learn by this glass to 
amend his manners." But admitting this, he added, " If people 
will be instructed (God be thanked) we have divines enough to 
discharge that, and more by a great many than are well heark- 
ened to." So that even in these days of its first infancy there 



204 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

was the earnest spirit of the time in the Elizabethan drama ; 
the same earnest spirit that in another form labored for its 
destruction. Stephen Gosson having left the stage, added to 
his invective a short " Apology for the School of Abuse," and 
went into the country as a tutor. Considerable public contro- 
versy followed Gosson' s attack on the stage. Early in 1582 
the players defended their calling in their own way by acting 
" A Play of Plays." Gosson then produced at once a five-act 
answer, entitled, " Plays Confuted in Five Actions, etc., prov- 
ing that they are not to be suffered in a Christian Common- 
wealth ; by the way both the cavils of Thomas Lodge and the 
Play of Plays written in their defence, and other objections 
of Players' friends, are truly set down and directly answered." 

In 1591, Gosson was made Rector of Great Wigborough, in 
Essex. In 1600, by an exchange of livings, he came to town, 
aged forty-five, as Rector of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, and 
there he officiated for nearly a quarter of a centuiy, until his 
death in 1624. 

11. But the Elizabethan time, like an}' other, had its surface 
follies and its varieties of fashion. In 1583 the Reverend 
Philip Stubbes published "The Anatomie of Abuses: con- 
te} T ning a Discoverie or Briefe Summarie of such Notable Vices 
and Imperfections as now raigne in many Christian Countreyes 
of the World : but especialie in a very famous Ilande called 
Ailgna : Together with most fearful Examples of God's Judge- 
mentes executed vpon the wicked for the same as well in Ailgna 
of late, as in other places elsewhere." Ailgna, of course is 
Anglia, and a second part of "The Anatomie of Abuses" 
appeared in the same } T ear. The book is in dialogue between 
Philoponus and Spudeus. Ailgna, says Stubbes, is a famous 
and pleasant land, with a great and heroic people, but they 
abound in abuses, chiefly those of pride ; pride of heart, of 
mouth, of apparel. In pride of apparel thej" pane, cut, and 
drape out with costly ornaments the richest material, and spread 
out ruffs with supportasses — wires covered with gold or silk — 
and starch. Philip Stubbes denounced starch as "the devil's 
liquor," and told of a fair gentlewoman of Eprautna (Ant- 
werp) upon whom a judgment had fallen for her vanity in 



ToA.D. 1600.] RICHARD HOOKER. 205 

starched ruffs, even so lately as the 27th of May, 1582. She 
was dressing to attend a wedding, and, falling in a passion 
with the starching of her ruffs, said what caused a handsome 
gentleman to come into the room, who set them up for her to 
perfection, charmed her, and strangled her. When she was 
being taken out for burial, the coffin was so heavy that four 
strong men could not lift it. It was opened. The body was 
gone ; but a lean and deformed black cat was sitting in the 
coffin, " setting of great ruffs and frizzling of hair, to the great 
fear and wonder of all the beholders." 

12. The literature of the Church of England was repre- 
sented in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign by Richard 
Hooker, who was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, about 1553. 
He was to have been apprenticed to a trade, but his aptness for 
stud}' caused him to be kept at school by his teacher, who per- 
suaded young Richard Hooker's well-to-do uncle, John, then 
Chamberlain of Exeter, to put him to college for a year. John 
Hooker, a friend of Bishop Jewel's, introduced his nephew to 
that bishop, who, finding the boy able and his parents poor, 
sent him at the age of fifteen to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, heard from Jewel the praises 
of young Richard Hooker, and, though himself a Cambridge 
man, sent his son to Oxford that he might have Hooker, whose 
age then was nineteen, for tutor and friend. Other pupils came, 
and Hooker was on the most pleasant relations with them. In 
1577 he became M.A. and Fellow of his college. In 1579, he 
was appointed to read the Hebrew lecture in his university, and 
did so for the next three 3'ears. He took holy orders, quitted 
Oxford, and married a scolding wife. He was shy and short- 
sighted, and had allowed her to be chosen for him. Of himself 
it is said that he never was seen to be angiy. In 1584 Hooker 
was presented to the parsonage of Drayton-Beauchamp, near 
Aylesbury ; and there he w T as found by his old pupil, Edwin 
Sandys, with Horace in his hand, relieving guard over his few 
sheep out of doors, and indoors called from his guests to rock 
the cradle. Sandys reported Hooker's condition to his father, 
who had become Archbishop of York., In 1585 the office of 
Master of the Temple became vacant, and Hooker, then thirty- 



206 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

two 3'ears old, was, through the archbishop's influence, called 
from his poor country parsonage to take it. There he be- 
came involved in a public discussion with an associate, Walter 
Travers, respecting the authority of the Established Church, 
Hooker's antagonist taking ground against it. This led Hook- 
er's pure and quiet mind to the resolve that he would argue out 
in detail his own sense of right and justice in the Established 
Church s}'stem of his country, in " Eight Books of the Laws of 
Ecclesiastical Polity." That he might do this he asked for re- 
moval to some office in which he might be at peace. He wrote 
to the archbishop: " My lord, when I lost the freedom of my 
cell, which was my college, yet I found some degree of it in 
my quiet country parsonage : but I am weary of the noise and 
oppositions of this place ; and indeed, God and nature did not 
intend me for contentions, but for study and quietness. My 
lord, my particular contests with Mr. Travers here have proved 
the more unpleasant to me, because I believe him to be a good 
man ; and that belief hath occasioned me to examine mine own 
conscience concerning his opinions." Study had not only sat- 
isfied him, but he had "begun a treatise, in which I intend a 
justification of the laws of our ecclesiastical polit}' ; in which 
design God and his holy angels shall at the last great da}' bear 
me that witness which my conscience now does, that my mean- 
ing is not to provoke any, but rather to satisfy all tender con- 
sciences ; and I shall never be able to do this but where I may 
study, and pray for God's blessing upon my endeavors, and 
keep myself in peace and privacy, and behold God's blessings 
spring out of my mother-earth, and eat my own bread without 
oppositions ; and, therefore, if your Grace can judge me worthy 
of such a favor, let me beg it, that I ma}' perfect what I have 
begun." Hooker accordingly was made, in 1591, Rector of 
Boscombe, in Wiltshire, a parish with few people in it, four 
miles from Amesbury, and was instituted also, as a step to bet- 
ter preferment, to a minor prebend of small value in Salisbury. 
At Boscombe, Hooker finished the " Four Books of the Lawes 
of Ecclesiastical Politie," published in 1504, with "A Preface 
to them that Seeke (as they tearme it) the Reformation of the 
Lawes and Orders Ecclesiasticall in the Church of England." 



To A.D. 1600.] RICHARD HOOKER. 207 

These four books treated, 1. Of laws in general ; 2. Of the use 
of divine law contained in Scripture, whether that be the only 
law which ought to serve for our direction in all things without 
exception; 3. Of laws concerning Ecclesiastical Polity, whether 
the form thereof be in Scripture so set down that no addition 
or change is lawful ; and, 4. Of general exceptions taken against 
the Laws of the English Church Polity as being Popish, and 
banished out of certain reformed churches. What Hooker said 
of Travers, Travers had like reason to say of Hooker : for this 
was the work of a good man, in the eyes of thousands whom it 
may not have convinced on points of discipline ; a work perfect 
in spirit, earnest, eloquent, closely reasoned, and in the best 
sense of the word religious. In 1595 Richard Hooker left Bos- 
combe for the rectory of Bishopsbourne, three miles from Can- 
terbury, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1597 appeared 
the fifth book of his " Ecclesiastical Politv," which was longer 
than all the other four together. He died in 1600, having, 
while his health failed, desired only to live till he had finished 
the remaining three books of the work, for which his life seemed 
to have been given him. His health suffered the more for his 
labor at them, but he did complete the remaining three books, 
though without the revision given to the preceding five ; and 
they were published, two in 1648, and all in 1662. 



CHAPTER II. 

SECOND HALF OP THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: 

ASCHAM, LYLY, SIDNEY, AND OTHER 

WRITERS OP SECULAR PROSE. 

1. Roger Asohani. — 2. John Lyly. — 3. Sir Philip Sidney. — 4. Literary History and 
Criticism; John Bale; William Webbe; George Puttenham.— 5. Literary 
Anthologies; John Bodenham ; Francis Meres. — 6. History and Biography; 
George Cavendish; Richard Grafton; John Stow; Ralph Holinshed. — 7. 
Books of Travel ; Sir Humphrey Gilbert ; Thomas Hariot ; Richard Hakluyt. 

1. There were during this period three great men of letters, 
whose writings are the most characteristic specimens of English 
literature, particularly in prose, for the second half of the six- 
teenth century, — Roger Ascham, John Lyly, and Sir Philip 
Sidney. 

Roger Ascham was born about the year 1515, in Kirkby 
Wiske, in Yorkshire, his father being house-steward in the fam- 
ily of Lord Scrope. He was educated by Sir Humphrej^ Wing- 
field, of whom he said afterwards: "This worshipful man hath 
ever loved, and used to have mairy children brought up in learn- 
ing in his house, among whom I myself was one, for whom at 
term-times he would bring down from London both bow and 
shafts. And when they should play he would go with them 
himself into the field, see them shoot ; and he that shot fairest 
should have the best bow and shafts, and he that shot ill-favored- 
ly should be mocked of his fellows till he shot better. Would 
to God all England had used or would use to lay the foundation 
of youth after the example of this worshipful man in bringing 
up children in the book and the bow ; by which two things the 
whole commonwealth, both in peace and war, is chiefly valid 
and defended withal!" At fifteen Roger Ascham became a 
student at St. John's College, Cambridge. He took his B.A. in 
1534 ; obtained a fellowship in his college ; and in 1537 became 

208 



A.D. 1550.] ROGER ASCHAM. 209 

a college lecturer on Greek. He was at home for a couple of 
years after 1540, dining which time he obtained a pension of 
fort}' shillings from the Archbishop of York. It ceased at the 
archbishop's death, in 1544. In that year Ascham wrote 
" Toxophilus ; " and in 1545, being then about twent3'-nine 
years old, he presented " Toxophilus " to the king, at Green- 
wich, and was rewarded with a pension of ten pounds. 

"Toxophilus" was a scholar's book, designed to encourage 
among all gentlemen and yeomen of England the practice of 
archery for defence of the realm. The treatise was divided into 
two books of dialogue between Philologus and Toxophilus ; the 
first book containing general argument to commend shooting, 
the second a particular description of the art of shooting with 
the long-bow. Ascham argued for it as a worthy recreation — 
one very fit for scholars — that in peace excludes ignoble pas- 
times, and in war gives to a nation strength. Men should 
seek, he said, to excel in it, and make it a stud}'. Then he pro- 
ceeded in the second part of his work to treat it as a study. 
The book was published in 1545, with a dedication to Henry 
VIII., and a preface, in which Ascham justified his use of 
English. To have written in another tongue would, he said, 
have better advanced his studies and his credit ; but he wished 
to be read by the gentlemen and yeomen of England. He could 
not surpass what others had done in Greek and Latin ; while 
English had usually been written by ignorant men so meanly, 
both for the matter and handling, that no man could do worse. 
Ascham was, in his preface to " Toxophilus," the first to sug- 
gest that English prose might be written with the same scholarly 
care that would be required for choice and ordering of words if 
one wrote Latin. " He that will write well in any tongue," said 
Ascham, " must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the 
common people do, to think as wise men do ; and so should 
eveiy man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow 
him. Mam' English writers have not done so, but using strange 
words, as Latin, French, and Italian, do make all things dark 
and hard." The manly simplicity of Ascham 's own English is 
in good accord with his right doctrine. His Latin was so well 
esteemed that in the year after the appearance of ' ' Toxophi- 



210 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

lus " he succeeded Cheke as public orator, and wrote the offi- 
cial letters of the University. 

Ascham was famous also for his penmanship, and taught 
writing to the Prince who in 1547 became King Edward VI. 
Under Edward VI., Ascham had his pension confirmed and 
augmented. In 1548 he became tutor to the Princess Eliza- 
beth, at Cheston ; but he was annoyed by her steward, and had 
therefore returned to the University, when, in 1550, he was 
through Cheke 's good offices appointed secretary to Sir Richard 
Morison, then going as ambassador to Charles V. He reached 
Augsburg in October, was away more than a year, and pub- 
lished in 1553 a " Report and Discourse written b} x Roger 
Ascham, of the Affairs and State of Germany and the Emperor 
Charles his Court, during certain years while the said Roger 
was there." Ascham, although a Protestant, had escaped per- 
secution in the reign of Mary ; his pension had been renewed, 
and in May, 1554, he had been appointed Latin secretary to 
the queen, with a salary of forty marks. In that 3'ear also he 
gave up his fellowship, and married Margaret Howe. Bj t 
Queen Elizabeth, Roger Ascham, who had been one of her. 
teachers in Greek, was still continued in his pension, and re- 
tained in his post of Latin secretaiy. In 1560 the queen gave 
him the prebend of Wetwang, in York Minster. The arch- 
bishop had given it to another, and Ascham did not get his dues 
without a lawsuit. In 1563, Ascham, as one in the queen's 
service, was dining with Sir William Cecil, when the conversa- 
tion turned to the subject of education, from news of the run- 
ning away of some bo3'S from Eton, where there was much 
beating. Ascham argued that 3'oung children were sooner 
allured by love than driven by beating to obtain good learning. 
Sir Richard Sackville, father of Thomas Sackville, said nothing 
at the dinner-table, but he afterwards drew Ascham aside, 
agreed with his opinions, lamented his own past loss b}^ a harsh 
schoolmaster, and said, Ascham tells us in the preface to his 
book, " ' Seeing it is but in vain to lament things past, and also 
wisdom to look to things to come, surely, God willing, if God 
lend me life, I will make this, mj' mishap, some occasion of 
good hap to little Robert Sackville, my son's son. For whose 



To A.D. 1 600. J ROGER ASCII AM. 211 

bringing- up I would gladly, if it so please you, use specially 
your good advice. I hear say you have a son much of his age 
[Ascham had three little sons] ; we will deal thus together. 
Point you out a schoolmaster who by your order shall teach my 
son and yours, and for all the rest I will provide, yea, though 
the}' three do cost me a couple of hundred pounds by year : 
and besides you shall find me as fast a friend to you and yours 
as perchance an}' you have.' Which promise the worthy gen- 
tleman surely kept with me until his dying day." The conver- 
sation went into particulars, and in the course of it Sir Richard 
drew from Ascham what he thought of the common going of 
Englishmen into Italy. All ended with a request that Ascham 
would "put in some order of writing the chief points of this 
our talk, concerning the right order of teaching and honesty of 
living, for the good bringing-up of children and young men.' ' 
This was the origin of Ascham's book called "The School- 
master." Ascham wrote in Latin against the mass, and upon 
other subjects connected with religious controversy. His deli- 
cate health failed more and more, and he ended his pure life as 
a scholar in 1568, at the age of fifty-three. His " Schoolmas- 
ter " was left complete, and published in 1570 by his widow, 
with a dedication to Sir William Cecil. Beseeching him, she 
said, to take on him " the defence of the book, to avaunce the 
good that may come of it by your allowance and furtherance to 
publike use and benefite, and to accept the thankefull recognition 
of me and my poore children, trustyng of the continuance of 
your good memorie of M. Ascham and his, and clayly commend- 
yng the prosperous estate of you and yours to God, whom you 
serve, and whose you are, I rest to trouble you. Your humble 
Margaret Ascham." The treatise is in two parts, one dealing 
with general principles, the other technical, as in " Toxophi- 
lus ; " the first book teaching the bringing-up of youth, the 
second book teaching the ready way to the Latin tongue. 
Great stress is laid in Ascham's "Schoolmaster" on gentle- 
ness in teaching. As to the true notes of the best wit in a 
child, Ascham will take, he says, "the very judgment of 
him that was counted the best teacher and wisest man that 
learning maketh mention of, and that is Socrates in Plato, 



212 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

who expresseth orderly these seven plain notes to choose 
a good wit in a child for learning." He was to be (1) 
euphues ; (2) of good memory; (3) attached to learning; 
(4) prepared for labor and pains ; (5) glad to learn of an- 
other ; (6) free in questioning; and (7) happy in well-earned 
applause. 

The first of these qualities, Aschani describes at especial 
length: '-Euphues is he that is apt by goodness of wit, and 
appliable by readiness of will, to learning, having all other 
qualities of the mind and parts of the body that must another 
day serve learning, not troubled, mangled, and halved, but 
sound, whole, full, and able to do their office : as a tongue not 
stammering, or over hardly drawing forth words, but plain and 
read}' to deliver the meaning of the mind ; a voice not soft, 
weak, piping, womanish, but audible, strong, and manlike ; a 
countenance not werish and crabbed, but fair and comely ; a 
personage not wretched and deformed, but tall and goodly, — 
for surely a comely countenance, with a goodly stature, giveth 
credit to learning, and authority to the person ; otherwise, com- 
monly, either open contempt or privy disfavor doth hurt or 
hinder both person and learning. And even as a fair stone re- 
quireth to be set in the finest gold, with the best workmanship, 
or else it loseth much of the grace and price, even so excellen- 
cy in learning, and namely divinity, joined with a comely per- 
sonage, is a marvellous jewel in the world. And how can a 
comely body be better employed than to serve the greatest exer- 
cise of God's greatest gift, and that is learning? " 

In illustration of the force of gentleness in teaching, Ascham 
cited in "The Schoolmaster" his finding of Lad}' Jane Grey, 
when he called on her at Broadgate, in Leicestershire, before 
his going into German}', reading Plato's " Phaedo " in Greek, 
" and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read 
a merry tale in Boccaccio." He asked her how that was ; and 
she said it was because God had given her severe parents and a 
gentle schoolmaster. At home she was so continually under 
punishment and censure, that she longed for the time when she 
must go to Mr. Aylmer, " who teacheth me so gently, so pleas- 
antly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the 



To A.D. 1600.] JOHN LYLY. 213 

time nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am called 
from him I fall on weeping, because whatsover I do else but 
learning is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto 
me." 

2. The work by which John Lyly is best remembered, 
"Euphues," derived both its name and substance from Roger 
Ascham's "Schoolmaster." Lyly was born in the Weald of 
Kent, about 1553 ; became a student of Magdalene College, 
Oxford, in 1569 ; took his degree of B.A. in 1573, and of 
M.A. in 1575 ; and was incorporated as M. A. of Cambridge in 
1579. It was in the spring of the year 1579 that he published 
"Euphues; or, the Anatomy of Wit." This earnest book, 
written at the age of five and twenty, made Lyly's reputation 
as a wit. Its form is that of an Italian story, its style a very 
skilful elaboration of that humor for conceits and verbal antith- 
eses which had been coming in from Italy, and was developing 
itself into an outward fashion of our literature. In form and 
st}'le, therefore, it sought to win a welcome from those fashion- 
able people upon whose minds there was most need to enforce 
its substance. In substance it was the argument of Ascham's 
"Schoolmaster" repeated: corruption of English life by the 
much going of our young men to Italy ; the right development 
of the young mind by education on just principles, to a worthy 
life and a true faith in God. 

In the dedication of his " Euphues " to Lord de la Warre, 
Lyly suggests that there ma}' be found in it " more speeches 
which for gravity will mislike the foolish than unseemly terms 
which for vanity may offend the wise." He anticipates some 
little disfavor from the ' ' fine wits of the day ; ' ' and his allu- 
sions to " the dainty ear of the curious sifter," to the use of 
" superfluous eloquence," to the search after "those that sift 
the finest meal and bear the whitest mouths," sufficiently show 
that his own manner was formed on an existing fashion. " It 
is a world," he says, "to see how Englishmen desire to hear 
finer speech than the language w r ill allow, to eat finer bread than 
is made of wheat, to wear finer cloth than is wrought of wool ; 
but I let pass their fineness, which can no way excuse my 
folly." But L}-ly being a master of the style he had adopted, 



'214: MANUAL OF ENGLISH UTERATURK [A.D. 1550 

his ingenious English was taken as the type of successful 
writing in :_r : ^iiionable manner: and from the title of his 
novel, the name of • • Euphuism ' ? was derived for the quaint 
og, rich in conceit, alliteration, and antithesis, which 
remained in favor till near the middle of the seventeenth 
century. 

Lyry's novel itself was in design most serious. He represented Eu- 
phues as yc ang gentleman of A:_rii5. —ho corresponded in his readi- 
ness :: wit and perfi::^e;5 :: body to the quality called Euphues by 
Plato. He went U Italy, :: Naples, "a place of more pleasure than 
profit, and yet of more profit than piety, the very wails and windows 
whereof showed it rather to be the tabernacle of Yenus than the temple 
:: Vesta, ... a court more meet for an atheist than one of Athens. 7 ' 
There lie showed so pregnant a wit. that Eubulus. an old gentleman of 
the place, was impelled to warn him at length against the ingers of the 
city in words ending with the solemn admonition. "Serve God, love 
'V .1. fe:.: ■>:.'.. .v_;: G:1^:V. i \ ;:lrss :nff ;.? :i:'_ : : l:::: o.\:". ~ isli >:r 
thy friends desir^.' Young EupLv.t: lisdained counsel of age, and 
bought experience in his own way. and at last came bitterly to regret 
that he had not followed the adr: ee : f Z ; : : olns. Then he escaped from 
the wickedness of Italy to his home in Athens, whence he wrote earnest 
letters ::' admonition to the friend in Italy. Philautus. who had been 
his companion in evil-doing. Increasing in earnestness, the hook then 
systematic 2ss npon education, sound as Ascham's in its doc- 
trine: dealing with the management of children from their birth, and 
advancing to the ideal of a university. Rising still in earnestness, as he 
si.;— rl Lis !:;'.".: ; _: — ::._ in wis.I:ni. Lfr. m; :"t :-. if::er :: :Lf i'fn- 
tlemen scholars of Athens preface to a dialogue between Euphues and 
Atheos, which was an argumen: against the infidelity that had crept in 
from Italy. It is as earnes: : ; .: L:.:imer himself had preached it to the 
courtiers of King Edward. Euphue 5 Is sole ton I y tc Script 

the voice within ourselves. In citation from the sacred text consist 
almost his only illustrations : in this he abounds. Whole pages contain 
nothing but the words of Scripture. 

This celebrated book, published in 1579, was followed in 
1580 hv a continuation, or second part, entitled w * Euphues and 
his England.' 1 This was apparently designed to mitigate some 
of the severity of the first, which had given offence at Oxford, 
and indirectly to deprecate, in courtly fashion, a too ruinous in- 
terpretation of the author's meaning. In the first part Lyly 
fied his conscience : in the second part, but still without 
iishonesty, he sa:i-Zv\ the court. 



To A.D. 1600.] JOHN LYLY. 215 

He had ended the first part with an intimation that Euphues was about 
to visit England, and promised, within one summer, a report of what he 
saw. In his second part, therefore, Euphues, bringing Philautus with 
him, lands at Dover, after telling a long moral story on the sea. The 
two strangers pass through Canterbury, and are entertained in a road- 
side house by a retired courtier. This personage keeps bees, and phi- 
losophizes over them ; from him we hear the lengthy story of his love, 
enriched with numerous conceited conversations. In London the trav- 
ellers lodge with a merchant, and are admitted to the intimacy of a lady 
named Camilla, who is courted and who finally is married, though she 
be below his rank, by noble Surius. With Camilla and the ladies who 
are her friends, the strangers converse much in courtly fashion. Philau- 
tus of course falls in love with her, and worries her with letters; but he 
is at last led by Flavia, a prudent matron, to the possession of a wife in 
the young lady Violet. Every Englishwoman is fair, wise, and good. 
Nothing is wrong in England ; or whatever is wrong, Lily satirizes with 
exaggerated praise. The story is full of covert satire, and contains much 
evidence of religious earnestness. It is designedly enriched with love- 
tales, letters between lovers, and ingenious examples of those fanciful 
conflicts of wit in argument upon some courtly theme, to which fine 
ladies and gentlemen of Elizabeth's court formally sat down as children 
now sit down to a round game of forfeits. Having saved to the last a 
panegyric upon Queen Elizabeth, which blends an ounce of flattery 
with certainly a pound of solid praise in its regard for her as the 
mainstay of the Protestant faith, Euphues retires to Athens, where, as 
he says, " Euphues is musing in the bottom of the mountain Silixsedra, 
Philautus is married in the Isle of England ; two friends parted, the 
one living in the delights of his new wife, the other in contemplation of 
his old griefs." 

The writing of these two books made Lyly famous, but not 
prosperous. He married, and settled in London ; wrote a 
pamphlet of religious controvers}' ; and was a diligent writer 
of plays, being among the p^wrights who held the field before 
Shakespeare entered it. His miseiy was that he had depended 
on court patronage. In 1593 he wrote to Queen Elizabeth : 
"Thirteene years your highnes servant, but yet nothing; 
twenty freinds that though the} T saje they wil be sure, I find 
them sure to be slowe. A thousand hopes, but all nothing ; a 
hundred promises, but yet nothing. Thus casting vpp the in- 
ventory of my freinds, hopes, promises, and t}'mes, the summa 
totalis amounteth to iust nothing. My last will is shorter than 
myne invencion ; but three legacies, — patience to my creditors, 



216 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

melancholie without measure to my friends, and beggerie with- 
out shame to my family." He died in 1606. 

3. Sir Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst in 1554, eldest 
child of Sir Henry Sidney and of Lad}- Mary Dudley, who was 
daughter to the Duke of Northumberland, and sister to the cele- 
brated Earl of Leicester. A grave, studious boy. Philip Sidney 
went to Shrewsbury School, and in 1568 to Oxford, where he 
remained three 3 T ears. He was for a time, probably, with his 
uncle Leicester at court; and in 1572 he attended an embassy 
to Paris, where he was on the 24th of August, during the 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. After travel through Germany 
and Italy, Sidney returned to England in 1575. In 1577, 
though but twenty- two years old, he was sent as ambassador 
to the Emperor of Germairy. He soon returned home ; and in 
May, 1578, when the queen visited Leicester at Wanstead, 
Sidney contrived for her pleasure a masque called ' ' The Lady 
of May." 

In July, 1578, Philip Sidney was one of the men of mark 
who followed Queen Elizabeth to Audley End, and received 
honors of verse from Gabriel Haiwy in the " Walden Gratula- 
tions." But Sidney was weaiy of idleness at court. His 
friend, Fulke Greville, returning from a foreign mission, re- 
ceived on his way from William of Orange a message for Eliza- 
beth, craving leave of her freely to speak his knowledge and 
opinion of a fellow-servant of his who lived imemploj'ed under 
her. He had had much experience, had seen various times and 
things and persons, but he protested that her Majest}- had in 
Mr. Philip Sidney one of the ripest and greatest statesmen that 
he knew of in all Europe. If her Majesty would but tiy the 
3'oung man, the prince would stake his own credit upon the 
issue of his friend's employment about an} T business, either 
with the allies or with the enemies of England. And this was 
said, not without reason, by William the Silent, of a young man 
of four and twemVy, who seems to have been the type of what 
was noblest in the 3 T outh of England during times that could 
produce a Shakespeare. 

At the beginning of 1580, Philip Sidney had addressed to 
the queen in writing a wise and earnest argument against the 



To A.D. 1600.] SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 217 

project of her marriage with the Duke of Anjou. His uncle, 
Leicester, whose secret marriage with Lettice, Countess of 
Essex, had become known, was alreacly under the queen's dis- 
pleasure ; and Sidne} T , after writing this letter, found it best 
to withdraw from court. Towards the end of March, 1580, he 
went to stay at Wilton with his sister, the Countess of Pem- 
broke, whom Spenser afterwards honored as 

" The greatest shepherdess that lives this day, 
And most resembling both in shape and spright 
Her brother dear;" 

and upon whose death, when her course was ended, Ben Jonson 

wrote : 

"Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse, 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother: 
Death, ere thou hast slain another 
Learn'd and fair and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee." 

Sidney remained there about seven months. Brother and 
sister worked together at that time upon a joint translation 
of " The Psalms of David" into English verse. It was then 
also that Sidney occupied hours of his forced idleness b} r begin- 
ning to write for the amusement of his sister a long pastoral 
romance, in prose mixed with verse, according to Italian fash- 
ion, with abundance of poetical conceits — his "Arcadia." It 
was done at his sister's wish, and as he wrote to her, "only 
for you, 011I3' to you. . . . For, indeed, for severer e}'es it is 
not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear 
self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of 
paper, most of it in your presence, the rest b}' sheets sent unto 
you as fast as the}' were done." This romance was not pub- 
lished by Sidney. Not long before his death, he said that he 
wished it to be burned. But it belonged to his sister, who 
valued it, and by her it was, after his death, prepared for the 
press, and published in 1590. Much of it was written during 
the summer of 1580, and the rest chiefly or entirely in 1581. 
Though long, Sidney's "Arcadia" is unfinished except b} r the 
addition of a hurried close. It is a pastoral romance of the 
Italian school of Sanazzaro ; but its intermixture of verse and 



218 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

prose develop? more completely a romantic story, and it acids 
to the pastoral a new heroic element. This was suggested 
partly by the Spanish romances of u Araadis" and ••Pal- 
merin." partly by the ■• ^Ethiopian Historie " of Heliodorus. 
lately translated from the Greek by Thomas Underdown. In 
another book. Sidney said that " it is not rhyming and versing 
that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advo- 
cate, who. though he pleaded in armor, should be an advocate. 
and no soldier." Sidney's ••Arcadia" maybe, in this sense. 
taken as all poet's work : giving a new point of departure for 
heroic romance grafted upon pastoral. As he was writing for 
his sister a romance after the fashion of his day. Sidney, in 
the •• Arcadia."' would amuse himself by showing how he also 
could be delicate and fine-conceited. 

There is much difference between the style ot Sidney's " Ar- 
cadia." and that of his •• Apologie for Poetrie." written in 1581, 
although not published until 1595, when Sidney was dead. This 
little treatise, in simple English, maintains against such attacks 
as Gosson's the dignity of the best literature. The •■ Apologie 
for Poetrie " is- the first piece of intellectual literary criticism 
in our language : it springs from a noble nature feeling what 
is noblest in the poet's art : is clear in its plan, terse in its Eng- 
lish : and while ail that it says is well said, it is wholly free from 
conceits. The conceited style, indeed, it explicitly condemns. 
as eloquence disguised in painted affectation: " one time, with 
so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but must seem 
strangers to any poor Englishman : another time, with coursing 
of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a dic- 
tionary : at another time with figures and flowers extremely win- 
ter-starved. But I would this fault were only peculiar to versi- 
fiers, and had not as large possession among, prose-printers'; 
and (which is to be marvelled) among many scholars: and 
(which is to be pitied) among some preachers. . . . For now 
they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the 
table : like those Indians, not content to wear ear-rings at the 
fit and natural place of the ears, but they will thrust jewels 
through .their nose and lips, because the}- will be sure to be 
fine.' r 



To A.D. 1600.] SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 219 

Shortly after writing his " Apologie for Poetrie," Sidney 
wrote his sonnets, — " Passions" of the old conventional type, 
— meaning, as usual, to address them to some lady who de- 
served compliment, and of whom his conventional rhapsodies 
could not very well be taken seriously. As the Earl of Surrey 
addressed his love-exercises to a child for whom the court felt 
sympathy, Sidney paid the like compliment to an unhappy wife, 
Penelope Devereux, daughter of his old friend, the late Earl of 
Essex. Sidney gave her the place of honor in his sonnet-writ- 
ing, wherein she was to be Stella (** the Star"), he Astrophel 
("the Lover of the Star") ; and certainl}-, as all the court 
knew, and as the forms of such ingenious love-poetry implied, so 
far as love in the material sense was concerned, with as much 
distance between them as if she had shone upon him from above 
the clouds. Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" sonnets were 
being written at the time when he was about to many Fanny 
Walsingham ; and in those earnest Elizabethan days, at the 
fitfully strict court of Elizabeth, since the character of such 
poetical love-passions was then understood, they brought upon 
Sidney's credit not a breath of censure. 

Philip Sidney, at court again, after the months of retirement 
at Wilton, during which he wrote " Arcadia," was knighted by 
Elizabeth in January, 1583, when his age was twenty-eight. 
In the following March he was married to Frances, eldest 
daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. In 1584 the course of 
events led Sir Philip Sidney to advocate direct attack b}" sea 
upon the Spanish power. He would have Elizabeth come for- 
ward as Defendress of the Faith, at the head of a great Protes- 
tant league. He was a member of the Parliament that met in 
November, 1584 ; and in July, 1585, he was joined with the Earl 
of Warwick in the Mastership of the Ordnance. His strong- 
est desires caused him to look in two directions for his course 
of action : he might aid in direct attack on the Spanish pos- 
sessions, which, as source of treasure, were a source of power ; 
he might aid in the rescue from Spain of the Netherlands. 
During a great part of the 3'ear 1585 his mind was very much 
with Drake and Raleigh. In November, 1585, Sidney went to 
the Netherlands to take part in the struggle of the people of 



220 MANUAL OF [ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D, 1550 

that country against the oppression of Spain. In September of 
1586, he was engaged in the investment of Zutphen. On the 
2 2d of that month he received his death- wound in a gallant 
assault made by a few hundred English against a thousand cav- 
alry, and under fire from walls and trenches. A musket-ball 
from one of the trenches shattered Sidney's thigh-bone. His 
horse took fright and galloped back, but the wounded man held 
to his seat. He was then carried to his uncle, asked for water, 
and. when it was given, saw a dying soldier carried past, who 
eyed it greedily. At once he gave the water to the soldier, 
saying, k> Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." Sidne}* lived 
on, patient in suffering, until the 17th of October. "When he 
was speechless before death, one who stood by asked Philip 
Sidney for a sign of his continued trust in God. He folded his 
hands as in prayer over his breast, and so the}' were become 
fixed and chill when the watchers placed them by his side ; and 
in a few minutes the stainless representative of the young man- 
hood of Elizabethan England passed away. 

4. The development of English literature is seen, in this 
period, in the -appearance of a history of itself, as well as in the 
production of several works of literary criticism and of a long 
series of literary anthologies. The first history of English litera- 
ture was written in Latin, by John Bale, who was born in Suffolk 
in 1495, and educated among the Carmelites of Norwich, and then 
at Jesus College, Cambridge. He became a Protestant, and, 
during the last six years of Henry VIII. 's reign, he lived in Hol- 
land. In 1552 Edward VI. made him Bishop of Ossory ; aud 
he afterwards painted his difficulties with a flock of antagonist 
faith in a book called " The Vocation of John Bale to the 
Bishopric of Ossoiy in Ireland ; his Persecutions in the same, 
and his final deliverance." After the accession of Mary, Bale 
escaped to Switzerland ; but he came to England upon the 
accession of Elizabeth, obtained in 1560 a prebend in Canter- 
bury Cathedral, and died in 1563. He was a writer of miracle- 
plays, of which he produced nineteen; and these were filled 
with thrusts of argument and satire against the Roman Catho- 
lics. But his most notable work is his account of English writ- 
ers, — ' k Scriptorum Illustrium Majoris Britannia? Catalogus," — 






To A.D. 1600.] GEORGE PUTTENHAM. 221 

published in folio by Opoirnus, at Basle, in 1557 and 1559. 
Though inaccurate, and warped by the controversial heat of 
the time, it is important as an aid to the stud}* of our early 
literature. 

The days that were to produce great poets produced also 
discussions on the art of poetry. Young King James of 
Scotland had tried his 'prentice hand at this ; Sidney had 
written "An Apologie for Poetrie.' , William Webbe, of 
whom little is known, w r as a Cambridge man, who took his 
B.A. about 1573, and was a friend of Harvey and Spenser. 
He was afterwards private tutor in the Sulyard family, at the 
manor-house of Flemings, near Chelmsford, and there he wrote 
in the summer evenings "A Discourse of English Poetrie," 
which was printed in 1586. Webbe shared Gabriel Harve3 T 's 
interest in the reformed English versifj'ing. His book, which 
dwells much on Phaer's "Virgil," and most upon Spenser's 
"Shepherd's Calendar," leads up to a discussion of metres, 
with special reference to Latin models and to his own transla- 
tion of the first two Eclogues of Virgil into English hexameters ; 
beginning thus : 

" Tityrus, happilie thou lyste tumbling under a beech tree, 
All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs lustilie chaunXing." 

Webbe added to his little book a summaiy of Horace's " Art 
of Poetiy," taken from George Fabricius, of Kemnitz, himself 
a ver} r good poet in Latin, who died in 1571. 

Another Elizabethan book upon the art of verse was by 
George Puttenham — "The Arte of English Poesie, con- 
trived into Three Bookes ; the first of Poets and Poesie, the 
second of Proportion, the third of Ornament," — written about 
1585, and published in the spring of 1589. The author, who 
cited a dozen other works of his own wdiich are lost, was 
born about 1530, had been a scholar at Oxford, had delighted 
in verse and written it, had seen the courts of France, Spain, 
Italy, and the Empire, was skilled in French, Italian, and 
Spanish, as well as in Greek and Latin; and in England he 
was one of the queen's gentlemen pensioners. His book is a 
S3'stematic little treatise, dealing with the origin and nature of 
poetry : its several forms, as satire, comedy, tragecty, etc. : its 



222 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

several metres and proportions, including the various ways of 
writing verse in shapes, as the lozenge, or rhombus ; the fuzie 
spindle, or rhomboides ; the triangle, or tricquet ; the square ; 
the pillar, pilaster, or C}*linder ; taper, or p}Tamis ; rondel, or 
sphere ; egg^ or figure oval ; with many of these reversed and 
combined ; a fashion then coming into use from Italy and 
France. Puttenham says that an Eastern traveller whom he 
met in Italy told him that this fashion was brought from the 
courts of the great princes of China and Tartaiy. The intro- 
ducer of k ' shaped verses ' ' into Europe is said to have been a 
Simmias of Rhodes, who lived under Ptolemy Soter, about 
324 B.C. Puttenham' s argument concerning metres includes, 
of course, some reference to the question of Latin quantity 
applied to English verse. The last book discusses the lan- 
guage of the poet ; tropes and figures of speech, with exam- 
ples ; fitness of manner, and the art that conceals art. Among 
illustrations of poetical ornament is a poem by Queen Elizabeth 
herself, written when the presence of Maiy Queen of Scots in 
England was breeding faction ; and the Queen of England, 
" nothing ignorant in those secret favors, though she had long, 
with great wisdom and patience, dissembled it, writeth this 
ditty most sweet and sententious, not hiding from all such 
aspiring minds the clanger of their ambition and dislo} T alty : " 

" The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, 
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. 
For falsehood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebb, 
Which would not be if reason ruled, or wisdom weaved the web. 
But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds, 
Which turn to rain of late repent by course of changed winds. 
The top of hope supposed, the root of ruth will be, 
And fruitless all their grafted guiles, as shortly ye shall see. 
Then dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, 
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights, whose foresight falsehood finds; 
The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow, 
Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow. 
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port: 
Our realm it brooks no stranger's force, let them elsewhere resort. 
Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ 
To poll their tops that seek such change and gape for joy." 

5. John Bodenham published in 1598 a collection of sen- 



To A.D. 1600.] RICHARD GRAFTON. 223 

tentious extracts from ancient moral philosophers, etc., called 
" Politeuphuia, or Wit's Commonwealth." It was designed 
chiefly for the benefit of 3'oung scholars, was popular, and often 
afterwards reprinted. In the same year, 1598, Francis Meres, 
M.A., published " Palladis Tamia : Wit's Treasury, being the 
Second Part of Wit's Commonwealth, " 12mo, of 174 leaves, 
Euphuistic, as its title indicates, and also designed for instruc- 
tion of the young. This book contained a brief comparison of 
English poets with Greeks, Latins, and Italians ; and is espe- 
cially remembered for its allusion to Shakespeare, showing the 
exalted opinion of him as a poet and dramatist, held b}' his 
immediate associates : " As the soule of Euphorbus was thought 
to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives 
in mellifluous and honj'-tongued Shakespeare ; witnes his c Ve- 
nus and Adcnis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugred 'Sonnets' among 
his private friends, etc. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted 
the best for corned}' and tragedj* among the Latines, so Shake- 
speare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds 
for the stage. ... As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would 
speake with Plantus' tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I 
say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine-filed 
phrase, if they would speake English." 

6. In the year 1661 appeared an interesting " Life of Wol- 
sey," by George Cavendish, who had entered Wolsey's ser- 
vice as a gentleman usher about the 3 T ear 1519, had been faith- 
fully attached to him during the last ten 3-ears of his life, and 
had spoken with the king immediately after Wolse3-'s death. 
He was invited into Henry's service ; but presently retired to 
his own little estate in Suffolk, with the wages due from the 
cardinal, a small gratuhry, and six of the cardinal's best cart- 
horses to convey his furniture. His book, which was written 
about the 3'ear 1554, was used as a source of information by 
the chroniclers whom Shakespeare read. 

Richard Grafton, who completed Hall's Chronicle, pro- 
duced in 1563 " An Abridgement ; " and in 1565 "A Manual 
of the Chronicles of England," from the Creation to the date 
of publication ; and in 1568 and 1569, in two folios, "A Chroni- 
cle at large and meere History of the Affayres of Englande and 
Kinges of the same." 



224 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

John Stow, born in Cornliill about 1525, was a tailor's 
son, and for a few years himself a tailor. But the life of the 
time stirred in him an enthusiasm for the study of English his- 
tory and antiquities. He produced, in 1561, "A Summaiy of 
English Chronicles," and gave time and labor in travel about 
the country to produce for posterity a larger record ; but he 
would have given up the delight and chief use of his life, to 
go back to tailoring for need of bread, if he had not been 
encouraged \>y occasional help from Archbishop Parker. His 
History first appeared in 1580, a quarto of more than twelve 
hundred pages, as " Annales, or a Generale Chronicle of Eng- 
land from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ, 1580." He 
still worked at history, and published in 1598, when more than 
seventy 3-ears old, the first edition of his " Survej r of London " 
— a book of great value. But he had lost his best friends, 
and at the end of Elizabeth's reign he was distressed by 
poverty. 

Ralph. Holinshed had produced, with help of John Hooker, 
Richard Stanihurst, Boteville, Harrison, and others, his Chroni- 
cle in 1577, when Shakespeare was thirteen years old. Pre- 
fixed to it was a "Description of Britaine," valuable as an 
account of the condition of the country at that time. It was 
in two folio volumes, with many woodcuts. The second edi- 
tion, which contained some passages that displeased the queen 
and required cancelling, appeared in 1586 and 1587, when 
Shakespeare's age was about twenty-three. It was chiefly 
in Hall and Holinshed that Shakespeare read the history of 
England. Of Holinshed himself little more is known than that 
he came of a respectable family at Bosley, in Cheshire, and 
that he was, in the latter part of his life, steward to a Thomas 
Burclet, of Bromcote, Warwickshire. 

7. Voyages of exploration and discover} 7 , which had increased 
rapidly in England since the da} T s of the Cabots, began to make 
for themselves a rich department in English literature. 

In 1574 George Gascoigne obtained from Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert his " Discourse to prove a Passage b} T the North- West 
to Cathay and the East Indies." He first sought to prove that 
America was an island ; and then brought together the reports 



To A . D . 1 600. ] RICH A RI) HAKL UYT. 2 2f) 

of vo}'agers by whom a north-west passage to Cathay and 
India had been attempted. By this route only, he argued, we 
could share the wealth derived b}~ Spain and Portugal from 
traffic with the East ; be unmolested 03- them in our course ; 
and undersell them in their markets, besides finding new 
sources of wealth, and founding colonies for the relief of 
overcrowded England. This treatise revived interest in the 
subject. It passed from hand to hand in MS., and was printed 
in 1576, the 3-ear in which Martin Frobisher started, on board 
"The Gabriel," of twenty-five tons' burthen, upon the first of 
his three voyages in search of a north-west passage. 

In 1588 Thomas Hariot, who had been of the unfortunate 
colony under Ralph Lane sent out b} r Sir Walter Raleigh to 
settle upon Roanoke Island, published "A Briefe and True 
Report of The New Found Land of Virginia," etc., in which 
he described the cultivation b}- the natives of the herb which 
they called " appowoc ; " but the Spaniards, " tabacco." " They 
use to take the fume or smoke thereof b} T sucking it through 
pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade," with 
wonderfully good results. "We ourselves," Hariot added, 
" during the time we were there, vsed to suck it after their 
maner, as also since our returne, and have found manie rare 
and wonderful experiments of the vertues thereof; of which 
the relation would require a volume b} T itselfe : the vse of it by 
so manie of late, men and women of great calling as else, and 
some learned phisitions also, is sufficient witnes." 

The narratives of our adventurous seafarers were in those 
days treasured for posterity by Richard Hakluyt, who was 
born at E}'ton, Herefordshire, in 1553. He was educated at 
AVestminster School, and Christchurch, Oxford, and delighted 
always in tales of far countries and adventure try sea. He 
entered the church, went to Paris in 1584 as chaplain to the 
English ambassador, and was made prebendaiy of Bristol. In 
1582, when he was twenty-nine years old, Hakluyt issued his 
first publication, " Divers Vo3'ages Touching the Discovery of 
America, and the Lands adjacent unto the same, made first of 
all by our Englishmen, and afterward b} T the Frenchmen and 
Bretons : and certain Notes of Advertisements for Observa- 



226 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550. 

tions, necessary for such as shall hereafter make the like at- 
tempt." Hakluyt also translated books of travel from the 
Spanish ; but his great work was that which first appeared in 
folio in 1589, — " The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, 
and Discoveries of the English Nation." 



CHAPTER III. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: 
POETRY AND THE DRAMA. 

1. Poetical Miscellanies. — 2. Devotional Poetry; Parker; Sternhold and Hopkins. 

— 3. Thomas Tusser. — 4. Thomas Sackville. — 5. "A Mirror for Magistrates." 

— 6. Nicholas Grimald. — 7. Thomas Churchyard. — 8. George Turbervile. — 
9. George Gascoigne. — 10. Gabriel Harvey. — 11. Edmund Spenser. — 12. 
Fulke Greville. — 13. George Whetstone. — 14. Thomas Watson. — 15. William 
Warner. — 16. Henry Constable and Robert Southwell. — 17. Sir John Davies. 

— 18. First English Tragedy. — 19. Translations of Latin Tragedies. — 20. 
Development of the Drama in England; Richard Edwards; Actors and Thea- 
tres.— 21. Thomas Lodge. — 22. Anthony Munday. — 23. The Writers of Plays. 

— 21. George Peele. — 25. John Lyly. — 26. Robert Greene. — 27. Henry Chet- 
tle. — 28. Thomas Kyd. — 29. Thomas Nash. — 30. Christopher Marlowe. 

1. The sweet spirit of song rises in the early 3-ears of 
Elizabeth's reign like the first chirping of the birds after a 
thunder-storm. "Tottel's Miscellany," issued in June, 1557, 
as " Songes and Sonnettes, written by the Ryght Honorable 
Lorde Henry Haward, late Earl of Surrey, and other," was as 
a brake from which there rose, immediately before her rule 
began, a pleasant carolling. Among the smaller song-birds 
there were two with a sustained rich note, for in this miscel- 
lany were the first printed collections of the poems of Sir 
Thomas W\-att and the Earl of Surrey. This is our earliest 
poetical miscellany, if we leave out of account the fact that 
pieces by several writers had been included, in 1532, in the 
first collected edition of Chaucer's works. Tottel's first edi- 
tion contained two hundred and seventy-one poems, the second 
contained two hundred and eight} T ; but thirty poems which 
appeared in the first edition were omitted in the second which 
appeared a few weeks later, so that between the two there were 
three hundred and ten poems in all. In 1559 there was a third 
edition of " The Miscellany; " in 1565, the year after Shake- 
speare's birth, a fourth ; the eighth, and last of the Elizabethan 

227 



228 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |A.D. 1550 

time, in 1587. During the reign of Elizabeth other books of 
the same kind appeared: "The Paradise of Dainty Devices,' ' 
collected by Richard Edwards, of her Majesty's Chapel, 
then dead, for a printer named Disle, and published in 1576 ; 
"A Gorgious Galleiy of Gallant Inventions," edited by 
Thomas Proctor, in 1578, with help from Owen Rawdon ; 
"A Handefull of Pleasant Delites," by Clement Robinson 
and divers other, in 1584; "The Phoenix Nest," edited by 
R. S., of the Inner Temple, gentleman, in 1593 ; "England's 
Helicon," edited by John Bodenham, in 1600; and "A 
Poetical Rhapsody," edited by Francis Davison, in 1602. 
The most popular of these was "The Paradise of Dainty 
Devices." 

2. In 1560, was published an English version of the Psalms, 
made, during his exile under the reign of Queen Mary, by 
Matthew Parker, whom Queen Elizabeth, at her accession, 
appointed to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Parker translated 
the Psalms into English verse, for comfort to himself like that 
of David, for whom in a time of trouble, as Parker says in his 
metrical preface, 

" With golden stringes such harmonie 
His harpe so sweete did wrest, 
That he reliev'd his phrenesie 
When wicked sprites possest." 

But th^ most celebrated English version of the Psalms was that 
entitled "The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into English 
metre by T, Sternhold, J. Hopkins, and others, conferred 
with the Ebrue, with Apt Notes to sing them withall." This 
appeared in 1562, and was then attached for the first time to 
the Book of Common Prayer. Among the "apt tunes" is 
that to which the 100th Psalm was sung, now known as " The 
Old Hundredth." It had been one of the tunes made bj- 
Goudimel and Le Jeune for the French version of the Psalms 
by Clement Marot. Thomas Sternhold, who died in 1549, had 
published one year before his death " Certajme Psalms," only 
nineteen in number. He was born in Hampshire, and, after 
education at Oxford, became groom of the robes to Henrv 
VIII., who liked him well enough to bequeath him a hundred 



To A.D. 1600.] THOMAS TUSSER. 229 

marks. He desired to do with his psalms in England what had 
been done in France b}' Marot, " thinking thereby that the 
courtiers would sing them instead of their sonnets, but did not, 
only some few excepted," whose religion we respect more than 
their taste. In the year in which Sternhold died, there ap- 
peared, with a dedication to Edward VI., a new edition of 
" All such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternhold, late grome 
of the Kinges Majestyes robes, did in his lyfe time drawe into 
Englysshe metre." This contained thirty-seven Psalms by 
Sternhold, and seven by John Hopkins, a Suffolk clerg}'man 
and schoolmaster, who joined in his labor. To an edition of 
1551, Hopkins added seven more psalms of his own. Hopkins 
and others then worked on with the desire to produce a com- 
plete version of the Psalms of David into a form suited for 
congregational singing. This was at last accomplished, as 
above mentioned, in 1562. 

3. As poetry in this time had its side looking toward religion, 
so it had its side looking toward trade, manual toil, and the 
material well-being of England. The most conspicuous example 
of this is Thomas Tusser. He was born about 1515, at 
Rivenhall, in Essex, was first a chorister at St. Paul's, and 
then was placed at Eton under Udall, of whom he says : 

" From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, 
To learn straightways the Latin phrase, 
Where fifty-three stripes given to me 
At once I had. 

For fault but small, or none at all, 
It came to pass thus beat I was : 
See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee 
To me, poor lad." 

Tusser went from P^ton to Cambridge, was fourteen 3 T ears at 
court under the patronage of Lord Paget, then took a farm in 
Suffolk, and rhymed about farming. He first broke out in 1557 
with his "Hundred Good Points;" but his crop of rhyming 
maxims had increased five-fold by the year 1573, when Richard 
Tottel published Tusser's "Five Hundreth Points of Good 
Husbandly," giving the round of the } T ear's husbandry month 
by month, in a book of ninety-eight pages, six and a half 
quatrains to a page. Tusser's strength may have been in high 



230 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

farming ; it was not in high poetry. Nevertheless, there is a 
musical sententiousness in his terse rhymes, and an air of busi- 
ness about them ; his Pegasus tugged over the clods with his 
shoulder well up to the collar, and the maxims were in a form 
likely to insure for them wide currency among the people. 
While less practical poets might bid their readers go idly 
a-Maying with Maid Marian, Tusser advised otherwise : 

" In May get a weed-hook, a crotch, and a glove, 
And weed out such weeds as the corn doth not love. 
For weeding of winter corn now it is best, 
But June is the better for weeding the rest." 

Thomas Tusser died in 1580. 

4. Perhaps the noblest specimen of English poetry produced 
between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser, was 
written, early in Elizabeth's reign, by a jxnmg man, Thomas 
Sackville, who, after giving this proof of possessing very 
high poetic genius, turned away- from poetry to politics, and 
became a distinguished courtier and statesman, dying at the 
council table of King James I., in 1608. He was born in 
1536, at Buckhurst, in Sussex, and was the son of Sir Richard 
Sackville, whom" we have found befriending Roger Ascham. 
Thomas Sackville went to Oxford at the age of fifteen or 
sixteen, and thence to Cambridge, where he took his degree of 
M.A. His university reputation as a poet was referred to by 
Jasper Heywood, before his version of Seneca's "Thyestes," 
published in 1560 : 

" There Saekville's sonnets sweetly sauste, 
And featly fyned bee." 

Thomas Sackville married, at the age of nineteen, the daughter 
of a privy councillor, and sat in a parliament of Philip and 
Mary at the age of twenty-one, as member for Westmoreland. 
In the first year of the reign of Elizabeth he was member for 
East Grinstead, and took part in business of the House. When 
he left the university, Sackville had entered himself to the Inner 
Temple ; and it was in promotion of the dramatic entertainments 
of that societ3 T of lawyers and law-students that he wrote the 
best parts of " Gorboduc," the first tragedy in English litera- 
ture. He was knighted in 1567, the year after his father's 



To A.D. 1600.] THOMAS SACKVILLE. 231 

death, and made a baron as Lord Buckhurst. He rose in the 
state, and after the death of Lord Burghley in 1598, succeeded 
him as High Treasurer of England. Early in the next reign, 
in 1604, Sackville was made Earl of Dorset; and b}^ either one 
of these three names, indiscriminately, Sackville, Buckhurst, 
and Dorset, is he mentioned in English literature. 

Sackville' s claim to perpetual remembrance as a poet rests 
upon his " Induction " to a series of poetical tragedies written 
hy several hands, and called "A Mirror for Magistrates." The 
"Induction" was first published in 1563. It follows the old 
forms, and is an allegoiy in Chaucer's stanza. Opening, not 
with a spring morning, but with winter night and its images of 
gloom and desolation, the poet represents himself abroad, 
mourning the death and ruin of all summer glory, when he 
meets a woe-begone woman clad in black, who is allegorically 
painted as Sorrow herself. Her home is among the Furies in 
the infernal lake : 

" 'Whence come I am, the dreary destiny 
And luckless lot for to bemoan of those 
Whom fortune, in this maze of misery, 

Of wretched chance, most woeful mirrors chose, 
That, when thou seest how lightly they did lose 
Their pomp, their power, and that they thought most sure, 
Thou mayest soon deem no earthly joy may dure." 

B}' Sorrow the poet was to be taken 

" First to the grisly lake, 
And thence unto the blissful place of rest, 

Where thou shalt see, and hear, the plaint they make 
That whilom here bare swing among the best." 

The descent of Avernus and the allegorical figures within the 
porch and jaws of hell — Remorse of Conscience, Dread, Re- 
venge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, Malady, Famine, War, 
Deadly Debate, Death — are described with dignity and energ} T 
of imagination. The poet, and Sorrow his guide, were ferried 
across Acheron, passed Cerberus, and reached the horror of the 
realm of Pluto. At the cry of Sorrow the rout of unhappy 
shades gathered about them ; and first Hemy Stafford, Duke of 
Buckingham, when he could speak for grief, began his plaint, 
bade Sackville mark well his fall, 



232 MAMJAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

"And paint it forth, that all estates may know; 
Have they the warning, and be mine the woe." 

Sackville wrote in the series no other tragedy than this, perhaps 
because his way of life drew liini from literature, perhaps because 
he was too good a poet to be satisfied with this manner of work. 
His complaint of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, abounds 
in poetry of thought and musical expression ; but the essential 
difference between a history and a poem makes itself felt. The 
unity of the piece as a poem is marred by faithful adherence to 
historical detail : and Sackville no doubt felt that he must either 
illustrate the good doctrine of Aristotle in his •• Poetics," and 
write poems that were not exactly histories, or he must write 
histories that were not exactly poems. The very excellence, 
also, and intensity of his " Induction." struck a note which the 
sequence of tragedies, unless they were true poerns. would not 
sustain. 

We shall meet with Sackville again, when we trace the prog- 
ress of dramatic literature in this period. 

5. The huge series of mournful biographies in verse, called 
•• A Mirror for Magistrates," to which Sackville contributed 
the poetic preface called the "Induction." had a popular repu- 
tation and a literary influence so great during the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, that we now need to pay to it particular 
attention. 

It appears that, in 1554. was printed at London an edition of 
Lydgate's "Falls of Princes." which is an English metrical 
version of Boccaccio's " Falls of Illustrious Men." This edition 
proved successful : and the printer of it conceived the idea of 
gratifying the public by a long sequel to that work, introducing 
only English characters, and conducting the story from the 
Norman Conquest downward. For this purpose, he applied for 
help to "William Baldwin, an ecclesiastic and busy man of 
letters, who had graduated at Oxford, had been a schoolmaster. 
had written - A Treatise of Moral Philosophy," had published 
a metrical version of " The Song of Solomon." had written 
comedies, and was even then engaged in preparing dramatic 
entertainments for the court of Queen Mary, as he had done 
for the court of King Edward VI. Baldwin undertook the 



ToA.D.i6oo.] "A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES." 233 

work proposed to him by the printer, and soon had associated 
with him in the task George Ferrers, who had been educated 
at Oxford and at Lincoln's Inn, had been a member of parlia- 
ment, had translated Magna Charta and other statutes from 
French into Latin and English, had composed interludes for 
the court, and in 1552 was the king's Lord of Misrule at Green- 
wich for the twelve days of Christmas. 

Chiefly by these two men, the first series of metrical biogra- 
phies, called "A Mirror for Magistrates," was written; and 
it was in part printed in 1555, but was stopped b} T the interven- 
tion of Stephen Gardiner, who was then Lord Chancellor, and 
who died in November of that 3'ear. After the accession of 
Elizabeth, a license was obtained, in 1559, and in that year 
" A Mirror for Magistrates " was first issued. It had a prose 
introduction, showing how it was agreed that Baldwin should 
take the place of Boccaccio, that to him the wretched princes 
should complain, and how certain friends "took upon them- 
selves every man for his part to be sundry personages." Then 
the) T opened books of chronicles, and "Maister Ferrers (after 
he had found where Bochas left, which was about the end of 
King Edward the Third's reign) said thus : — 'I marvel what 
Bochas meaneth, to forget among his miserable princes such as 
were of our own nation. . . . Bochas, being an Italian, minded 
most the Roman and Italian ston~, or else, perhaps, he wanted 
the knowledge of ours. It were, therefore, a goodly and nota- 
ble matter to search and discourse our whole stoiy from the first 
beginning of the inhabiting of the isle. But seeing the printer's 
mind is to have us follow where Lydgate left, we will leave that 
great labor to other that may intend it, and (as one being bold 
first to break the ice) I will begin at the time of Richard the 
Second, a time as unfortunate as the ruler therein.' " Ferrers 
began, therefore, with the fall of Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice 
of England, in Chaucer's stanza, with the lines lengthened 
from ten S3'llables to twelve. There are some other measures ; 
but the greater part of "A Mirror of Magistrates" is in 
Chaucer's stanza, with prose talk by the company between the 
tragedies. The work, as published in 1559, contained nineteen 
tragedies ; beginning with " Tresilian," and ending with " Ed- 



234 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

ward IV." The greater number of these were written hy 
Baldwin: Ferrers wrote three ; and one, on Owen Glendower, 
was written by Phaer, the translator of Virgil. 

The work reached a second edition in 1563 ; but, in the mean 
time, one true and great poet had become interested in it, 
Thomas Sackville, who, in place of the bungling prose preface 
to the first edition, substituted his stately and pathetic " Induc- 
tion," following that with his " Complaint of Buckingham." 
To this edition was added still another story, — that of " Jane 
Shore," bj T Thomas Churchyard. 

From this time onward until 1610, "A Mirror for Magis- 
trates " was steadily increasing in popularity, and in bulk like- 
wise ; for in each successive edition other verse-makers kept 
adding to the original store of tragic anecdote from English 
history. In 1574 John Higgins, a clergjman and school- 
master in Somersetshire, published what he called "The First 
Part of the Mirror for Magistrates," containing sixteen legends 
of his own, for the period from Brut to the birth of Christ. He 
opened his work with a general Induction in Chaucer's stanza, 
which was suggested to him by Sackville' s. In 1578 appeared 
what was called "The Second part of the Mirror for Ma- 
gistrates," containing twelve legends by Thomas Blener- 
hasset, and filling up in the wide scheme the period from 
Caesar's Invasion to the Norman Conquest. In 1587, these 
new portions, together with some additional legends, were 
blended with the original work, which began with the Norman 
Conquest. This was the most complete form attained by the 
work during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was popular 
throughout that reign, and one of the sources from which drama- 
tists, when they arose, drew plots for pla} T s. The last edition 
of the work, in which increments of the poem were given, 
appeared in 1610, edited by Richard Niccols, " newly en- 
larged with a last Part, called a Winter Night's Vision, being 
an addition of such Tragedies, especially famous, as are ex- 
empted in the former History, with a Poem annexed, called 
England's Eliza." This final edition contained ninetj'-one 
legends. A good modern reprint of the work was edited by 
William Haslewood, and published in 1815. Concerning this 



ToA.D. 1600.] THOMAS CHURCHY AED. 235 

famous work, "Warton says : " It is reasonable to suppose that 
the publication of ' A Mirror for Magistrates ' enriched the 
stores and extended the limits of our drama. These lives are 
so many tragical speeches in character. The}* suggested scenes 
to Shakespeare. Some critics imagine that historical plaj's 
owed their origin to this collection. At least it is certain that 
the writers of this ' Mirror ' were the first who made a poetical 
use of the English chronicles recently compiled by Fabyan, 
Hall, and Holinshed, which opened a new field of subjects and 
events, and, I may add, produced a great revolution in the state 
of popular knowledge." 

6. Nicholas Grimald was born about 1519, in Hunting- 
donshire, was educated at Christ's College, took his B.A. in 
1540, in 1542 was incorporated at Oxford, and elected a pro- 
bationer fellow of Merton College, Oxford. In the first edi- 
tion of %i Totters Miscellany," two poems of his were published, 
which have especial interest as the first specimens in English 
of original blank verse. One was a piece of one hundred and 
fifteen lines, on " The Death of Zoroas, an Egyptian Astrono- 
mer, in First Fight that Alexander had with the Persians," 
beginning : 

"Now clattering arms, now raging broils of war, 
Can pass the noise of taratantars' clang" — 

(" taratantars " altered in the next edition to " dreadful trum- 
pets"). The other was a somewhat shorter piece, upon the 
" Death of Cicero." Grimald, who also distinguished himself 
as a translator, died, probably, in 1562. 

7. Thomas Churchyard, born at Shrewsbury about 1520, 
and a soldier in his earlier 3-ears, was not only the author of 
two of the better class of tragedies in "A Mirror for Magis- 
trates " — " Jane Shore " and " Wolse} r " — but a bus} r poet, 
whose literal activity began with Elizabeth's reign, and con- 
tinued to its close. He died in 1604, after an unprosperous 
life of dependence upon patrons, and had these lines for 
epitaph : 

" Poverty and poetry his tomb doth inclose; 
Wherefore, good neighbors, be merry in prose." 

His u Davie Dicar's Dream," published in 1563, produced 



236 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

from Thomas Camel a metrical "Rejoinder to Churchyard," 
and led to a controversy of wits. Among Churchyard's 
numerous publications were, in 1575, "The First Part of 
Churclryard's Chips, containing Twelve Labors " — not Hercu- 
lean, a collection of twelve pieces; in 1578, "A Praise and 
Report of Frobisher's Voyage," a "Description of the Wars 
in Flanders," a translation of the " Three First Books of Ovid 
de Tristibus," and a description of his own devices for the 
entertainment of the queen in Norwich in that year. In 1579 
he published " A Welcome Home to Frobisher ; " "The Ser- 
vices of Sir William Drury, Lord Justice of Ireland;" and a 
piece on " The Miserie of Flaunclers, Calamitie of France, Mis- 
fortune of Portugal, Unquietness of Ireland, Troubles of Scot- 
land, and the Blessed State of England." The chief of many 
works by Churclryard after 1579 was his patriotic poem on 
Welsh worthies, " The Worthiness of Wales," published in 
1587, with a dedication to the queen. 

8. George Turbervile was born in Dorsetshire, about 
1530; was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford; 
became secretary to Sir Thomas Randolph, ambassador at the 
court of Russia ; and lived into the latter part of Elizabeth's 
reign. He published, besides translations from the Latin and 
Italian, a volume of his own poems as " Epitaphes, Epigrams, 
Songs, and Sonets ; with a Discourse of the friendly Affections 
of Tymetes to Pindara his Ladie." Turbervile takes a pleasant 
place among the elder Elizabethan poets. He wrote also books 
of "Falconry" and "Hunting." 

9. George Gascoigne, son and heir of Sir John Gascoigne, 
was born about the } T ear 1536, perhaps in Westmoreland, edu- 
cated at Cambridge, admitted to Gra3 T 's Inn in 1555, and called 
as an Ancient of his Inn in 1557. At the accession of Eliza- 
beth, George Gascoigne was an ardent j^outh of about twenty- 
two, disinherited by his father, caring more for literature than 
for common law. In 1566 there were represented at Gray's 
Inn two pla} T s of his preparing, both translations. One, 
called "The Supposes," was a prose translation of Ariosto's 
comedy, " Gli Suppositi ; " the other was "Jocasta," an 
adaptation from the " Phcenissse " of Euripides. This, the 



ToA.D. 1600.] GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 237 

first acted version of a Greek pla}', was, like " Gorboduc," 
written in blank verse, and with a dumb-show before eveiy act. 
In 1572, Gascoigne published "A Hundreth Sundrie Floures 
bound up in one small Poesie." He had then Lord Gre}' of 
Wilton, a strict Calvinist, for patron, and was, at the time 
of publication, a captain in the Netherlands under William of 
Orange, who, in Jul}' of that }'ear, was declared by the deputies 
of eight cities stadtholder of Holland. Gascoigne's adventures 
in the Netherlands were over, and he was living at Walthamstow 
in 1575, when he described "The Princely Pleasures at Kenil- 
worth," began his satire called " The Steel Glass," and pre- 
fixed verses of commendation to a book of Turbervile's. In 
1576, George Gascoigne published "The Steel Glass," and 
"The Complaint of Philomene," besides "A Delicate Diet for 
Daintie-mouthdc Droonkards," and in October, 1577, he died. 
The " Complaint of Philomene " is, in form of elegy, the fable 
of " The Nightingale." " The Steel Glass " is a clever satire, 
which upholds with religious earnestness a manly and true life. 
Satire, who has Plain Dealing for father, Simplicit}- for mother, 
and Poes}' for sister, complains here that his sister has been 
married to Vain Delight, and that eveiy man will have a glass 
' ' to see himself, 3-et so he seeth him not : ' ' 

" That age is dead and vanished long ago 
Which thought that steel both trusty was and true, 
And needed not a foil of contraries, 
But showed all things even as they were indeed. 
Instead whereof our curious years can find 
The crystal glass which glimseth brave and bright, 
And shows the thing much better than it is, 
Beguiled with foils of sundry subtle sights, 
So that they seem, and covet not to be." 

Gascoigne's satire therefore resolves to hold up the faithful 
glass of burnished steel, and from it show true images of men. 
The poem is in about eleven hundred lines of blank verse, and 
is the first example in our language of a poem of any length, 
and not dramatic, written in that measure. It is also the only 
example, before Milton's " Paradise Lost," of an English poem 
of any length in blank verse, except an insignificant work hy 
W. Vallans, published in 1590, as "The Tale of the Two 
Swans." 



238 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

10. Gabriel Harvey, who had high reputation in his own 
age, is chiefly remembered now for his friendship with Sidney 
and Spenser, and for his efforts to "reform" the whole system 
of English versification. He was born about 1545 ; was edu- 
cated at Cambridge ; and in 1576, when Spenser came there as 
a student, Harvey was a lecturer in the university on rhetoric. 
The introductory lecture of Harvey's course in 1577, apparently 
his second course, was published under the name of " Cicero- 
nianus ; " and his first two lectures of the course for 1578 were 
also published, under the name of "Rhetor." He had then 
advanced from a close following of Bembo and other Italians, 
who exalted above all things the Ciceronian style, and had 
received an impulse to the appreciation of individuality in other 
authors, from the reading of Jean Sambuc's " Ciceronianus." 
He had learned, within that } T ear, to look for the whole man in 
a writer as the source of st} T le, and, still exalting Cicero, to 
attend first to the life and power of the man, and not to the 
mere surface polish of his language. "Let every man," he 
said, ' ' learn to be, not a Roman, but himself. ' ' Gabriel Harve} 7 , 
then, was no pedant, though he is often called one. In 1578, 
when Queen Elizabeth visited Leicester at Audley End, Gabriel 
Harvey, whose home was in the neighborhood, had an interview 
with the queen, an account of which is preserved in his Latin 
poems, " Gratulationes Waldenses." Harvey pressed forward 
with his homage, and the queen said, "Who is this? Is it 
Leicester's man that we were speaking of ? " Being told that 
it was, she said, " I'll not deiry you my hand, HarvejV Again, 
as the subject of another set of verses, "Tell me," the queen 
said to Leicester, " is it settled that you send this man to Italy 
and France ? " " It is," said he. " That's well," she replied, 
" for already he has an Italian face, and the look of a man ; I 
should hardly have taken him for an Englishman" — like an 
Italian for the dusk}' hue which Thomas Nash afterwards com- 
pared to rancid bacon. Here, then, we learn that Harvey was 
in Leicester's service, and about to be sent abroad by him. 
As " Leicester's man," Harvey had become acquainted with 
Philip Sidne}', Leicester's nephew. Likeness in age, and love 
of literature, had developed between them a friendship in which 



To A.D. 1600.] EDMUND SPENSER. 239 

Spenser now was joined, — small personal incidents that had 
much to do with the movement and quality of English poetry 
in those clays, and since. 

Harvey long survived both his friends, dying, in extreme old 
age, in 1630 or 1631. He wrote the poem by "Hobbinol" 
prefixed to " The Faery Queen," and he had a furious contro- 
versy with the dramatists Greene and Nash. We are most 
interested now in his three letters respecting the ' ' English 
reformed versifying," which meant a fanc} T of the da} r among 
some university men who discussed literature together — Har- 
vey, Spenser, Sidney, and Sicily's friends and college com- 
panions, Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville, with others — for 
the abolishing of rhyme and introduction of the Latin system 
of quantity into English verse. They were amusing themselves 
with English hexameters, sapphics, and other forms derived 
from the old Latin poetiy- Spenser sent Harve}' four lines of 
hexameter as a sample, and asked, " Seem the} T comparable to 
those two which I translated you extempore in bed the last 
time we lay together in Westminster ? " He observed difficulties 
in accent, and, desiring a fixed S3~stem to work upon, wished 
Harvey would send him "the rules and precepts of art which 
3-011 observe in quantities, or else follow mine that M. Philip 
Sidney gave me, being the very same which M. Drant devised, 
but enlarged with M. Sidney's own judgment, and augmented 
with my observations, that we might both accord and agree in 
one, lest we overthrow one another and be overthrown of the 
rest." 

11. Edmund Spenser was born in or about the year 
1553. He belonged to a branch of the family of the Spencers 
of Althorpe, Northamptonshire ; and, though born in London, 
his home as a boy was in the North of England, probabl}' upon 
the Yorkshire border of Lancashire. In 1569 he entered Pem- 
broke College, Cambridge, as a sizar. In the same year there 
was published a book devised by S. John Van cler Noodt, a 
refugee from Brabant, called "A Theatre wherein be repre- 
sented as well the Miseries and Calamities that follow the 
Voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures 
which the Faithful do enjoy. An Argument both Profitable and 



240 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

Delectable to all that sincerely love the Word of God." The 
book opened with six pieces, which were the first six of the 
"Visions of Petrarch" translated by Spenser, and tliej r were 
followed by some translations which, with later change from 
blank verse into rhyme, ma}' be identified among Spenser's 
"Visions of Bella} T ." Spenser's participation as a youth in 
such a work as Van der Noodt's agrees with what we learn of 
him in later } T ears. Spenser graduated as B.A. in 1573, and 
as M.A. in 1576. In the } T ear 1579, Spenser, who was then in 
Leicester's service and Sidney's societ} T , a frequent guest at 
Penshurst, and a young man with a career opening before' him, 
published his first book, "The Shepherd's Calendar." The 
little book was published anonymously, with a dedication to the 
noble and virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both 
of learning and chivalry, Master Philip Sidney. "The Shep- 
heardes Calender, conteyning Twelve iEglogues proportionable 
to the Twelve Monethes," and dedicated to Philip Sidney, was 
introduced by " E. K." — Edward Kirke, an old college friend 
of Spenser's and Hand's — with a letter to Gabriel Harvey, 
in which " the new poet " was said to have begun with eclogues, 
"following the example of the best and most ancient poets, 
which devised this kind of writing, being both so base for the 
matter and homely for the manner, at the first to try their abili- 
ties," and to have other works by him sleeping in silence, " as 
his ' Dreams,' his ' Legends,' his ' Court of Cupid,' and sundry 
others." " E. K." added a postscript, urging Gabriel Harvey 
to give to the world also his own " gallant English verses." A 
"glosse," of small value, was added by " E. K." to each ec- 
logue. In his " Shepheardes Calender," Spenser derived from 
Skelton the name of Colin Clout, which he applied to himself 
also in later poetr}-. The Colin Clout of Skelton was a homeh' 
Englishman, who felt that many wrongs were waiting to be 
righted, and especially condemned luxury and self-seeking of 
the higher clergy. Spenser was of one mind with Skelton upon 
this, and took his side at once in the church controversies of 
the time, although in doing so he boldly placed himself beside 
those who had least of the queen's favor. 

In August of the following year, 1580, we find Spenser act- 



To A.D. 1600.] EDMUND STENSER. 241 

ing as private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, a strict 
Puritan, who in that month arrived in Dublin as Lord Deputy 
of Ireland. A great part of Ireland was then in insurrection ; 
and rough and merciless work was to be done b}^ Lord Grey 
and his soldiers, among whom was Captain Walter Raleigh, then 
twenty-eight 3'ears old, and perhaps then beginning his mem- 
orable friendship with the poet. Raleigh's energy was over- 
bearing, and weak leaders did not love the bold, proud, and 
plain-spoken captain, who shone in conflict with the rebels, 
and in suggestion of policy for quelling the rebellion ; until, in 
December, 1581, he was sent back to the court at London with 
despatches. 

After the massacre at Del Oro, Spenser returned with Lord 
Arthur Grey to Dublin. In 1581, Spenser was made Clerk of 
Degrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, 
and received also a lease of the lands and abbey of Ennis- 
cortlry, in Wexford Count}'. He transferred the lease within a 
year; and in 1582, Lord Arthur Gre}', " after long suit for his 
revocation, received her Majesty's letters for the same." Spen- 
ser remained in Ireland as an English government official. In 
1588 he vacated his post in the Irish Court of Chanceiy, on 
being appointed clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1589 he 
came to London with Sir Walter Raleigh, to present to the 
queen the first three books of "The Faery Queen," which 
were first published in 1590. 

His "Shepherd's Calendar " had been reprinted in 1581 and 
1586, and he was known to a limited number of people as a 
promising young poet. His fame was now about to rise upon 
the world. He was introduced by Raleigh to Elizabeth, and 
published in 1590 the first section, containing the first three 
books, of "The Faerie Queene, Disposed into Twelve Books, 
Fashioning XII. Morall Vertues." It was dedicated to her 
Majesty, and had a prefatoiy letter addressed to Sir Walter 
Raleigh, dated Jan. 23, 1589 (New Style, 1590). Spenser had 
been at work on his great poem for more than ten 3 T ears, and the 
part of it now published was received with universal admiration. 
This sudden burst of renown caused the publisher to get to- 
gether a volume of other poems b} T Spenser, which he published 



242 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

in 1591, under the title of "Complaints." This volume con- 
tained Spenser's " The Ruines of Time ;■" " The Teares of the 
Muses ; " " Virgils Gnat ; " " Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds 
Tale ; " " The Ruines of Rome, by Bella}- ; " " Muiopotmos, or 
the Tale of the Butterflie ; " " Visions of the Worlds Vanitie ; " 
' ' Bellayes Visions ; ' ' and ' ' Petrarches Visions. ' ' ' ' The Ruines 
of Time," dedicated to Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pem- 
broke, was a series of mournful visions, forming a poem' in 
Chaucer's stanza, on the death of " Philisides " (Sir Philip 
Sidney). The " Ruins of Rome" and the " Visions," both 
from Bellay, his own "Visions of the World's Vanity," and the 
" Visions " of Petrarch, are alike in form, and written sonnet- 
wise, the " Visions " of Belktv, and "Visions" of Petrarch, 
being chiefly a new version of Spenser's youthful contribution 
to the "Theatre for Worldlings." 

Spenser wrote also about this time an eleg}^ on the death of 
the wife of Arthur (afterwards Sir Arthur) Gorges, a " lover 
of learning and virtue." The lady was daughter and heir of 
Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Bjndon, and the poem was pub- 
lished separately, under the name of "Daphnaida." 

In February, 1591, Spenser received, as further earnest of 
success, a pension of fifty pounds a 3'ear from Queen Elizabeth. 
In October, 1591, a grant was made or confirmed to him of 
land in Cork, with the old castle of Kilcolman, in which he 
seems to have lived before his visit to England, and which had 
belonged to the Earls of Desmond. It was two miles from 
Doneraile, on the north side of a lake fed by the River Awbey, 
Spenser's Mulla. After his return to Ireland, Spenser dedicated 
to Sir Walter Raleigh, from his house at Kilcolman, the 27th of 
December, 1591, his poem entitled " Colin Clout's Come Home 
Again," to which additions were mad^ before its publication. 
In this poem, Colin, having told his fellow-shepherds how Ra- 
leigh, "the Shepherd of the Ocean," visited him in 1589, and 
caused him to " wend with him his C3'nthia to see," described, 
in pastoral form, England, the queen herself, and, under pas- 
toral names, celebrated personages of the court and living poets. 
Among them was he of the name Shake Spear, that doth heroic- 
ally sound : 



ToA.D. 1600.] EDMUND SPENSER. 243 

" And there, though last, not least, is Aetion; 
A gentler shepherd may no where be found : 
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, 
Doth like himself e heroically sound." 

This was not published until 1595, and in the satire year ap- 
peared Spenser's sonnets or ct Amoretti," and the " Epithala- 
mium," an exquisitely musical and joyous bridal song, written 
about the time of his own wedding. No lady's name is publicly 
associated with the sonnets, and they were written doubtless for 
the pleasure of the lad}' who became his wife. Three or four of 
them contain personal references, but the rest are of the usual 
kind. Spenser had been married on the 11th of June, 1594, 
when his age was about forty, to a lad}' living near Kilcolman, 
whose name, like the name of his queen and of his mother, was 
Elizabeth. In 1595 he had come to England again with the 
next instalment of three books of " The Faery Queen," and 
with a prose " View of the Present State of Ireland," in a dia- 
logue between Eudoxus and Iremeus, which was circulated in 
manuscript, but was not printed until more than thirty years 
after his death. It was hard in the policy it recommended, and 
about Kilcolman Spenser was not kindly remembered. The 
second part of " The Faery Queen," containing the fourth, 
fifth, and sixth books, appeared in 1596, together with a re- 
print of the first three books. In the same year Spenser, 
while in London, added to two hymns of Love and Beaut}', 
written years before, two other hymns of Heavenly Love and 
Heavenly Beaut}'. These " Hymns " were published at once, 
and in the same year appeared also his " Prothalamium " on 
the marriage of two daughters of the Earl of Worcester. Spen- 
ser published nothing more before his death. In 1597 he re- 
turned to Kilcolman. In 1598 he was named by the queen for 
sheriff of Cork. Children had been born to him ; there were 
two sons living, Sylvanus and Peregrine. In October, 1598, 
Tyrone's rebellion broke out. Kilcolman was attacked, plun- 
dered, and burnt. Spenser and his family were cast out ; an 
infant child of his is said to have perished in the flames, but 
that is doubtful. Spenser was thus driven back to England, 
and died soon after his arrival, on the 16th of January, 1599, 



24:4: MANUAL OF .ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

at a tavern in King Street, Westminster, where he had taken 
his lodging in order to be near the court, to which he looked 
for repair of his fortunes. 

Let us now turn to give some attention to Spenser's master- 
piece. The form of verse contrived by him for use in ''The 
Faery Queen" is a nine-lined stanza, called "Spenserian." 
It was made hy adding an Alexandrine to the stanza that 
French poets often use in the " Chant Royal," a longer fonn 
of balade, called "Royal Song," in which God was the king 
celebrated. That eight-lined stanza was applied also to other 
uses. Marot. for example, who did not use it for his " Chants 
Royaux," made it the measure of his poem on the marriage of 
James V. of Scotland with Magdalene of France. Chaucer 
and followers of his had used it now and then, as in the " En- 
voye to the Complaint of the Black Knight," in " Chaucer's 
A B C," in " The Balade of the Visage without Painting." and 
" L" Envoy e a Bukton." It consisted of two quatrains of ten- 
syllabled lines, with alternate rhyme ; the second rhyme of the 
first quatrain agreeing with the first rhyme of the quatrain that 
followed, thus a b a b, b c b c ; this could go on indefinitely upon 
the same system — c d c d, d e d e, e f e f, etc. Now. Spen- 
ser's added line follows the system of the verse as to its rhyme, 
but destroys expectation of continuance by the two extra syl- 
lables, which close with a new turn the music of the stanza. 
Thus the Spenserian stanza becomes as to its rhyming aba b, 
b c b c. c. 

The literary form of the poem is that of a romance of chiv- 
alry, which was in that day the most popular that could have 
been selected. Spenser not only followed Spanish romances, 
and Ariosto's " Orlando," but adapted himself to the humor 
of his time, as illustrated by the " Famous History of the Seven 
Champions of Christendom," — a pious romance of saintly 
knights and fair ladies, dragons and chivalrous adventures, told 
in Euphuistic style, of which the first part, which Spenser had 
read, appeared probably about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, 
the second part certainly in 1597. Richard Johnson, whose 
name is associated with this book, and who finished re-editing 
it in the year of Shakespeare's death, was not its author. 



To A.D. 1600.] EDMUND SPENSER. 245 

Shakespeare also had read it ; and since Elizabeth's time it has 
been dear to man}* generations of children. Spenser formed 
his allegory out of stock incidents in such romances, but he so 
told his story as to give to every incident a spiritual meaning. 
"The Faery Queen" abounds in graceful imitations or para- 
phrases from the ancient poets, and from Ariosto and Tasso ; 
incidents are also suggested by Spenser's readings in Arthurian 
romance, in the first part of " The Seven Champions," in " The 
Orlando Furioso," and in Tasso's heroic poem. 

In Spenser's letter to Raleigh prefixed to the fragment of 
" The Faery Queen," " expounding his whole intention in the 
course of this work," he said only that he labored '-to pour- 
traict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave 
knight, perfected in the twelve private moral vertues, as Aris- 
totle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve 
books; which if I finde to be well accepted, I maybe perhaps 
encouraged to frame the other part, of polliticke vertues in his 
person after that hee came to be king." It was left for the 
reader to discover how grand a design was indicated b} r these 
unassuming words. Spenser said that by the Faery Queen whom 
Arthur sought, " I mean glory in my generall intention, but in 
my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person 
of our soveraine the queene, and her kingdome in Faeryland." 
The student 'of " The Faery Queen " must bear in mind that its 
" general intention " is its essential plan as a great spiritual allc- 
goiy ; that this is consistent throughout, is the very soul of the 
poem, source of its immortal life; and that the " particular " 
significations, which are frequent and various, are secondary 
senses lying only on the surface of the main design, with which 
the}* harmonize, and to which the}* gave a lively added interest 
in Spenser's time. Faeiy means in the allegoiy spiritual. A 
faery knight is a spiritual qualit}* or virtue militant, serving the 
Faery Queen, Gloriana, which means in the general allegory 
Glory in the highest sense — the glory of God. Read out of 
allegoiy, therefore, " The Glory of God " is the name of Spen- 
ser's poem. Again said Spenser, in this introductory letter: 
" In the person of Prince Arthure I sette forth Magnificence in 
particular ; which vertue, for that (according to Aristotle and 



246 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it 
them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deecles of 
Arthure applyable to that vertu, which I write of in that booke ; 
but of the xii. other vertues I make xii. other knights the pa- 
trones, for the more variet} T of the histoiy." Spenser's ethical 
system was bound up with his religion ; he painted, therefore, in 
his separate knights, each single virtue of a man striving heaven- 
ward, but failing at some point, and needing aid of divine grace. 
This came through Arthur, in whom all the virtues are con- 
tained, who is filled with a great desire towards the Faery Queen 
— the glory of God — and who above all represents, in the 
literal sense of the word, magnificence, since he may be said to 
indicate the place of the Mediator in the Christian S3~stem. If 
we had had all twelve books of the poem, which was left only 
half finished, the}' would have been an allegoiy of man battling 
heavenward with all his faculties, through trial and temptation. 
The other poem, had it followed, would have been an endeavor 
to represent through allegoiy .an ideal citizenship of the king- 
dom of heaven. Because " The Faeiy Queen " was published 
incomplete, Spenser told so much of what its readers could have 
found in the whole work as was necessaiy to direct their under- 
standing to the well-head of the histoiy, " that from thence 
gathering the whole intention of the conceit, }*e ma}' as in a 
handfull gripe al the discourse." He gave the dew into our 
hands, and then left us to find our own wa} T through the poem 
upon which he spent the best thought of his life. 

Spenser believed that he had given aid enough for the inter- 
pretation of his allegory. In the introduction to his second 
book he told the reader that 

"Of faery lond, yet if he more inquyre, 
By certein signes, here sett in sondrie place, 
He may it fynd : ne let him then admyrej 
But yield his sence to bee too blunt and bace 
That no'te without an hound fine footing trace." 

Spenser's "fine footing" has been traced but carelessly; 
while all readers have felt the sweetness of music, and enjo}*ed 
the feast of imagination that "The Faery Queen " offers to 
those who simply yield themselves up to a sense of the sur- 



ToA.D. 1600.] FULKE GREVILLE. 247 

passing beauty of its pictures and of its deeply earnest spiritual 
undertone. Profoundly earnest, and the work of a pure mind, 
" The Faeiy Queen " is yet bitter at core. It is the work of 
a great poet, who felt and expressed both the essence and the 
accidents of the great struggle in which he was himself a com- 
batant. Through all its delicious melody it breathes a stern 
defiance of whatever cause was not, in the e} T es of a true-hearted 
Elizabethan Puritan, the cause of God. The deeper allegory 
that expresses abstract truth holds on throughout " The Faery 
Queen" its steady course, but it is conveyed through many 
references, in their own time not in the least obscure, to affairs 
of England, Ireland, France, Spain, Belgium. For example, 
in the ninth canto of Book V. Spenser enforced the whole case 
for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots ; and at the begin- 
ning of the next canto he spoke his mind, still on the surface 
of the allegory of Mercilla and Duessa, upon Elizabeth's un- 
willingness to sentence Mary. The doom was 

" by her tempred without griefe or gall, 
Till strong constraint did her thereto enforce: 
And yet even then ruing her wilful! fall 
With more than needfull naturall remorse, 
And yeelding the last honour to her wretched corse." 

The larger allegoiy dealt .here with the mere}' that should 
season justice ; but the bitterness of conflict was so prominent, 
that on the publication, in 1596, of the second part of " The 
Faery Queen," which contained this passage and others like 
it, King James of Scotland desired Spenser's prosecution. 
The English ambassador in Scotland wrote to Lord Burghle}', 
in November, 1596, that he had satisfied the kino; as to the 
privilege under which the book was published, yet that the lat- 
ter still desired that Edmund Spenser, for this fault, might be 
tried and punished. 

12. Fulke G-reville, also known as Lord Brooke, a school- 
fellow of Sidne} T 's and his life-long friend, was born in 1554, of 
an old Warwickshire family ; became an ornament of Elizabeth's 
court, and lived into the time of Charles I., being throughout 
his life the influential friend of man} T poets and scholars. He 
was knighted by Elizabeth in 1591, and was raised to the peer- 



248 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

age, as Lord Brooke, in 1620; in 1628, he was murdered by 
his servant. " Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes," by 
Fulke Greville, were published in 1633, including his tragedies 
of " Alaham " and " Mustapha." He left behind him also a 
short life of Sir Philip Sidney, which was published in 1652. 

13. George Whetstone, who was in repute with his con- 
temporaries as " one of the most passionate above us to bewail 
the perplexities of love," wrote, under a name taken from the 
popular stoiy-book of Marguerite of Navarre, "A Heptame- 
ron of Civil Discourses." This also is a book of tales. 
Among those which he took from the "Hecatommithi," or 
" Hundred Tales," of Giraldi Cinthio, first published in 1565, 
tales which deal with the tragic side of life, is one that was 
used by Shakespeare for the plot of his ' ' Measure for Meas- 
ure." Whetstone had himself written a play on the same 
subject, "Promos and Cassandra," in two parts, printed in 
1578. 

14. Thomas Watson was born about 1558, and died in 
1592. The thirty-five years of his life were all lived in Eliza- 
beth's reign. He was born in London, studied in Oxford, 
then in London again, and applied himself to common law ; 
was in Paris for a time before 1581, in which year he published 
a version in Latin of the " Antigone " of Sophocles. A scholar 
and a poet ; at first writing chiefly in Latin, afterwards in Eng- 
lish verse ; appreciated as he deserved to be by Sidne}-, Lyly, 
and Peele ; a friend of Spenser's, — Watson was the sweetest of 
the purely amatory poets of Elizabeth's reign. In 1582 appeared 
his book with a Greek and English title — Greek titles were 
then becoming fashionable — "The 'Exaro^Ttadia, or Passionate 
Centurie of Love," that is to say, a love passion in a hundred 
sonnets. According to the old Italian method, which had been 
revived by Surre}', exercises upon various phases of the passion 
of love in sequences of sonnets were still in fashion ; these 
poems were known as Passions. Each of Watson's hundred 
Passions has a prose explanation before it ; and each consists 
of three of the six-lined stanzas then called Common Verse, 
the stanza which, as King James VI. recorded, poets were 



ToA.D. 1600] HENRY CONSTABLE. 249 

to use "in materis of love." Take one of Watson's for 

example : 

"Tully, whose speech was bold in ev'ry cause, 
If he were here to praise the saint I serve, 
The number of her gifts would make him pause, 

And fear to speak how well she doth deserve. 
Why then am I thus bold, that have no skill ? 
Enforced by love, I show my zealous will." 
In 1585 appeared Watson's Latin poem, " Amyntas," from 
which his fellow-poets took the name they gave him in their 
rhymes; and in 1593 — after " Italian Madrigals Englished" 
and other works — appeared his "Tears of Fan qj ; or, Love 
Disdained." 

15. William Warner, born in London about the 3~ear of 
Elizabeth's accession, a poetical attorne\% celebrated "Albion's 
England " in thirteen books of fourteen-syllabled rhyming 
verse, first published in 1586. His poem was of Albion's 
England, because it did not, like Albion, include Scotland. 
It was an easy, lively, homely history of England, from the 
Deluge down to Warner's own time, homely in use of simple 
idiomatic English, full of incidents and stories often rudely 
told, and often with a force or delicacy of touch that came of 
the terse directness with which natural feeling was expressed. 
Warner's poem had for a time great popularity. He was not 
a great poet, but the times were stirring, and the}' drew ten 
thousand lines of lively verse upon his countiy, even from an 
attorney. 

16. Henry Constable published in 1592 twenty-three son- 
nets, under the title of " Diana ; or, the Praises of his Mistres 
in Certaine Sweete Sonnets:" five were added to the next 
edition (1594). Other occasional verses and his "Spiritual 
Sonnets" bear witness to his ingenuity, and sense of music. 
Constable belonged to a good Roman-Catholic family, was born 
about 1555, became B.A. of St. John's College, Cambridge, 
1579, and falling, as a Roman Catholic, under suspicion of 
treasonable correspondence w r ith France, left England in 1595. 
In 1601 or 1602 he ventured to return, was discovered, and 
committed to the Tower, whence he was not released till the 
close of 1604. He was dead in 1616. With the name of Henry 



250 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

Constable should be associated that of Robert Southwell, 
who was born in 1560, was educated at Douai, and returned to 
England in 1586 as a Jesuit missionaiy. In 1592 he was thrown 
into the Tower ; he was ten times put to the torture that he might 
disclose a plot against the queen ; and in 1595 he was executed 
at Tyburn. He was a man of deep and earnest nature ; and for 
the saintliness of his life, and the meekness of his submission to 
a cruel death, he has been and is greatly revered. Besides prose- 
works, chiefly devoted to religious consolation, he wrote " St. 
Peter's Complaint, with other Poems," and " Mseonise, or certain 
excellent Poems and Spiritual Hymns." He ma} T be regarded 
as the founder of modern English devotional poetiy. 

17. John Davies — who did not become Sir John till after 
the death of Elizabeth — was born in 1570, third son of John 
Davies, a lawyer at Westbury, in Wiltshire. He was sent to 
Oxford at the age of fifteen, as commoner of Queen's College, 
and thence went to study law at the Middle Temple, but he 
returned to Oxford in 1590 and took his degree cf B.A. He 
was called to the bar in 1595, and in 1596 published a poem on 
the art of dancing, entitled " Orchestra." In the Middle 
Temple John Davies had been sometimes under censure for 
irregularities, and in February, 1598, he was expelled the 
Societ}' for beating one Mr. Martin in the Temple Hall. John 
Davies then went back to Oxford and wrote a poem of good 
thoughts, pithily expressed, in quatrains. The poem was called 
"Nosce Teipsum : This Oracle Expounded in Two Elegies. 
1. Of Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, and the 
Immortalite thereof; " dedicated to Elizabeth, and published in 
1599. Its stanzas of elegiac verse were so well packed with 
thought, alwaj's neatly contained within the limit of each stanza, 
that we shall afterwards have to trace back to this poem the 
adoption of its measure as, for a time, our "heroic stanza." 
The manner of it may be shown in a few quatrains that point 
the connection between " Nosce Teipsum" and its author's 
recent disgrace at the Middle Temple : 

"If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks 
(Making us pry into ourselves so near), 
Teacli us to know ourselves, beyond all books, 
Or all the learner! schools that ever were. 



ToA.D. 1600.] SACKVILLE AND NORTON. 251 

"This mistress lately pluck'd me 6y the ear, 
And many a golden lesson hath me taught; 
Hath made my senses quick and reason clear ; 
Reform' d my will, and rectify' d my thought. 

"So do the winds and thunders cleanse the air; 
So working seas settle and purge the wine ; 
So lopp'd and pruned trees do nourish fair; 
So doth the fire the drossy gold refine." 

Thenceforth there was a change in Davies's career. He was a 
member of the parliament which met in October, 1601, showing 
liberal interest in the privileges of the House and the liberties 
of the people. In Trinity term of that }~ear he was restored to 
his old rank in the Temple, and at the death of Elizabeth 
stood ready for a rapid rise in his profession. 

18. We have alreacly seen that the first comedy in English 
dramatic literature was written by Nicholas Udall, probably 
about the year 1540. Just twenty-one years later, at the 
Christmas festivities of the Inner Temple, was presented for 
the first time the earliest English tragedy. This tragedy is now 
known under either of two titles, "Gorboduc," or " Ferrex 
and Porrex." It was written b}~ two }'oung men, both mem- 
bers of the Inner Temple ; one of them being that Thomas 
Sackville whose genius and career we have studied in con- 
nection with his poems in " A Mirror for Magistrates." His 
associate in the composition of "Gorboduc" was Thomas 
Norton. He was eldest son of a small landed proprietor, of 
Sharpenhoe, in Bedfordshire, and was born in 1532. He 
became a good scholar and zealous Protestant, served in his 
youth the Protector Somerset, and then, in 1555, entered him- 
self as a student of the Inner Temple. In 1561 he published 
a "Translation of Calvin's Institutes," which went through 
five editions in his lifetime ; he also contributed to the Psalter 
of Sternhold and Hopkins that appeared in 1562 ; and he trans- 
lated Newell' s " Greater Catechism." 

The story on which the tragedy of ' ' Gorboduc ' ' is founded 
was taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's " Histoiy of British 
Kings," and was chosen as a fit lesson for Englishmen in the 
first year of the reign of Elizabeth. It was a call to English- 



252 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

men to cease from strife among themselves, and knit themselves 
into one people, obedient to one undisputed rule. Each act 
is opened with a masque, or dumb-show ; and as the play was 
modelled on the Tragedies of Seneca, there was at the close 
of eveiy act except the last a chorus. Except for the choruses, 
Sackville and Norton used the newly-introduced blank verse- as 
the measure of their tragedy. Hitherto this measure had been 
little used by us, and never in an original work of any mag- 
nitude. 

The plot of "Gorboduc" is very simple, and is thus stated in the 
argument prefixed to the printed copies of the play: " Gorboduc, King 
of Britain, divided his realm in his lifetime to his two sons, Ferrex and 
Porrex. The sons fell to dissension. The younger killed the elder. 
The mother, that more dearly loved the elder, for revenge killed the 
younger. The people, moved with the cruelty of the fact, rose in 
rebellion and slew father and mother. The nobility assembled and 
most terribly destroyed the rebels ; and afterwards, for want of issue of 
the prince, whereby the succession to the crown became uncertain, they 
fell to civil war, in which both they and many of their issues were slain, 
and the land for a long time almost desolate and miserably wasted." 

The play ends with a long moralizing on the situation by Eubulus, 
which includes a glance at the danger to the kingdom: 

" When, lo, unto the prince, 
Whom death or sudden hap of life bereaves, 
No certain heir remains." 

Thus our first tragedy distinctly grew out of the life of its own time, 
and gave expression to much that lay deep in the hearts of Englishmen 
in the first years of Elizabeth's reign. The best poetry of the play is in 
the fourth act, which certainly is Sackville's; and it is probable that the 
fifth act was also written by him; while the first three acts were the work 
of Norton. 

This tragedy, which has peculiar interest for us as standing 
at the head of its department of English dramatic literature, 
having been first performed at the Inner Temple, in the Christ- 
mas holida} T s of 1561, was presented again on the 18th of 
Januar}^ following, upon a great decorated scaffold in the 
queen's hall in Westminster, by the gentlemen of the Inner 
Temple, after a masque. An unauthorized edition of it was 
published in 1565 as " The Tragedy of Gorboduc." Our first 
printed tragedy appeared, therefore, when Shakespeare was one 
3 T ear old. " Ralph Roister Doister," our earliest comedy, was 



To A.D. 1600.] JASPER HEYWOOB. 253 

first printed in 1566, when Shakespeare was two years old. 
Thus Shakespeare and the English drama came into the world 
together. The authorized edition of " Gorboduc " did not 
appear until 1571, and in that the name of the pla}- appeared 
as " Ferrex and Porrex." 

19. From this account of the first original tragedy in our 
literature, we turn to note the fact of the great attention paid 
at this time to the Latin models in the tragic drama. Thus, in 
1559, two years before the first presentation of "Gorboduc," 
Richard Tottel printed " in Flete Strete, within Temple Barre, 
at the signe of 'The Hand and Starre,' " a translation into 
English verse of " the sixt tragedie of the most grave and pru- 
dent author, Lucius Annseus Seneca, entituled 'Troas,' with 
divers and sundrie additions to the same, newly set forth in 
Englishe 03- Jasper Hey wood, student in Oxforde." This 
man was the 3'ounger son of John Hey wood, whom we have 
seen as a favorite composer of interludes and other entertain- 
ments at the court of Henry VIII., of Edward VI., and of 
Mary. Jasper Hey wood was born about 1535, was educated 
at Oxford, and some months before the publication of his ver- 
sion of the "Troas," being twenty-three 3-ears old, had re- 
signed a fellowship at Merton College for fear of expulsion. 
He was elected to a fellowship of All Souls', but left the uni- 
versity, and in 1561, having held 03- his father's faith, became 
a Roman-Catholic priest. He joined the Jesuits, studied the- 
ology for two years, and, after some time abroad, returned to 
England as Provincial of the Jesuits in 1581. He went abroad 
again, and died at Xaples in 1598. Some poems of his are 
in "The Paradise of Daint3 r Devices;" and he translated 
from Seneca, in the first 3-ears of Elizabeth's reign, not only 
the "Troas," but also the "Thyestes," in 1560, and the 
" Hercules Furens," in 1561. He opened his " Troas " with a 
preface in Chaucer's stanza, but he wrote his dialogue chiefly 
in couplets of fourteen-syllabled lines. Thus, for example, 
Hecuba begins : 

" YThoso in pomp of proud estate or kingdom sets delight, 
Or who that joys in princes' court to bear the sway of might, 
He dreads the fates which from above the wavering gods down flings, 



254: MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

But fast affiance fixed hath in frail and fickle things ; 

Let him in me both see the face of Fortune's flattering joy. 

And eke respect the ruthful end of thee, ruinous Troy ! *' 

Sometimes the measure of the dialogue changes to a four-lined 
elegiac stanza, which is the measure also of a chorus added by 
Jasper He}-wood himself to the first act : 

" O ye to whom the Lord of land and seas, 

Of life and death, hath granted here the power, 
Lay down your lofty looks, your pride appease, 
The crowned king fieeth not his fatal hour." 

At the opening of the second act of the " Troas," Jasper Hey- 
wood raised the sprite of Achilles, and made him speak in 
Chaucer's stanza : 

" The soil doth shake to bear my heavy foot. 
And fear'th again the sceptres of my hand. 

The poles with stroke of thunder-clap ring out, 
The doubtful stars amid their course do stand, 
And fearful Phoebus hides his blazing brand ; 

The trembling lakes against their course do flyte, 

For dread and terror of Achilles' sprite." 

Other men set to work on other tragedies of Seneca : and 
with some variety in the choruses, they followed, in the choice 
of metres, the lead of Jasper Heywood, entirely discarding blank 
verse. Alexander Neville published, in 1560, a translation of 
the "CEdipus;" John Studley translated these four — * k Hip- 
polytus," "Medea," "Agamemnon," and "Hercules CEta&us ;" 
Thomas Nuee translated " Octavia ; " and the " Thebais " was 
translated by Thomas Newton, who. in 1581, collected the ten 
translations into a single volume, published as "Seneca: his 
Tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh." These transla- 
tions indicate the strong influence of the Latin tragedy upon 
the minds of scholars and poets in the birth-time of our native 
drama. 

20. Having now examined the first comedy and the first 
tragedy in our literature, we proceed to study the rapid devel- 
opment of the English drama from the earlier years of the reign 
of Elizabeth, to the end of the sixteenth century, when our 
drama culminates in the career of Shakespeare. 



ToA.D. 1600.] ACTORS AND THEATRES. 255 

In the Christmas holidays of 1564, what is called a tragedy, 
perhaps "Damon and Pithias," by Richard Edwards, a 
musician and writer of interludes, was acted before her Majesty 
by the children of the Chapel Royal, Richard Edwards being 
then their master. For its happy end and its intermixture of 
farcical matter, as in the shaving of Grim the Collier \>y the 
court lackeys, that rlryming play is a comedy, but it includes a 
tyrant and a hangman. Edwards was born in Somersetshire, 
and was a student at Corpus Christ! College, Oxford, before 
he became attached to the court. That to the court he looked 
for his advancement we may infer from the form of his father's 
blessing, given in a poem of his in " The Paradise of Dainty 
Devices : " 

"My son, God guide thy way, and shield thee from mischance, 
And make thy just deserts in court thy poor estate advance." 

In 1561, Elizabeth made him a gentleman of the Royal Chapel, 
and master of the singing boys. He was in very high repute 
for his comedies and interludes. On the 3d of September, 
1566, Edwards's " Palamon and Arcyte " was acted before 
Elizabeth, in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford. At the begin- 
ning of the pla}', part of the stage fell in ; three persons were 
killed, and five hurt ; but the play was acted, and the queen 
enjoyed it, giving eight guineas to one of the }*oung actors who 
pleased her much. 

At court it was the business of the Master of the Revels to 
have plays rehearsed before him, and to choose the best. In 
the course of 1571 the plays acted before the queen were "Lad} T 
Barbara," by Sir Robert Lane's men; " Iphigenia," hj the 
children of Paul's; " Ajax and Ulysses," by the children of 
Windsor ; ; ' Narcissus," by the children of the Chapel ; " Clo- 
ridon and Radiamanta," hy Sir Robert Lane's men; "Paris 
and Vienna," by the children of Westminster. In 1572 it 
was enacted that all fencers, bear-wards, common players in 
interludes, and minstrels not belonging to any baron of this 
realm, or to any other honorable personage of greater degree, 
should be treated as rogues and vagabonds if they had not the 
license of at least two justices of the peace. This requirement 



256 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

was renewed twenty-five years later. In May, 1574, the Earl 
of Leicester procured, as special privilege for his own servants, 
James Burbadge, John Perkyn, John Lanham, William John- 
son, and Robert Wylson, the first royal patent "to use, exer- 
cise, and occupy the art and faculty of playing Comedies, 
Tragedies, Interludes, Stage Plays, and such other like as they 
have already used and studied, or hereafter shall use and stud}', 
as well for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our 
solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them," 
within the city of London and its liberties, or in any other 
city, without let ; " provided that the said Comedies, Tragedies, 
Interludes, and Stage Plays be by the Master of the Revels 
(for the time being) before seen and allowed ; and that the 
same be not published or shown in the time of Common Praj^er, 
or in the time of great and common Plague in our City of 
London." The city authorities opposed the concession of 
this patent: but in Jul}', 1574, a letter was written from the 
Privy Council requiring the Lord Mayor " to admit the comedy 
players within the city of London, and to be otherwise favora- 
bly used." In 1575 the Common Council framed regulations 
that were in effect prohibitory ; for they required not only that 
a license should be obtained from the Lord Mayor for every 
exhibition, but also that half the players' profits should be 
given up for charitable uses. 

As yet no theatre had been built. Actors produced their 
entertainments upon scaffolds set up for the purpose in con- 
venient places. In a town there was no place more convenient 
than the inn-yard, as the inn-yard used to be when there was 
much travelling by coach and on horseback. The large inner 
square of the building, entered by an archway, had, at least on 
the first floor, often on other floors, a gallery round it, into 
which rooms opened. The stage built against one side of the 
yard had close above it a piece of gallery which could be, and 
was, curtained off with it for use. It would serve for a window 
or a balcony, from which a king or a fair lady looked down ; 
it would serve for the battlements of a castle, from which an 
attacking force could be defied ; it would serve for the top of 
his palace, from which David observed Bathsheba. In the 



ToA.D. 1600.] ACTORS AND THEATRES. 257 

unenclosed part of the gallery above, on each side of the 
curtains, was the music. The trumpet sounded thrice, and at 
the third sound of the trumpet the curtain before the stage 
was drawn to either side, thus framing it in drapery. Upon 
the stage there was no scenery. A bed, or a table and chair, 
might be produced if necessary, or a god might be let down 
in a chair if the arrangement of galleries and windows in the 
place of performance made it easy to do that ; but the play 
itself was the whole entertainment. The players did their 
best in dressing and in acting ; the poet did his best to enter- 
tain the people and provide the players with effective parts. 
What scenery the poet wanted he could alwa}'s paint for 
himself in words. A large part of the audience stood on the 
ground in the open yard, — groundlings of the original pit, for 
whom at first there were no seats provided. The galleries sur- 
rounding the old inn-yard were the first circles of boxes, and 
the rooms of the inn, which could be taken for solace of the 
more luxurious, were the first private boxes. After theatres 
had been built, those boxes were for some time called u rooms." 
The acting was at first on holidays, because on working-days, 
when most people were about their business, onl}- the few idlers 
could afford to give attention to the pla}' ; for there was no 
acting after dark. The play was always over in time to enable 
playgoers to get back home before sunset. Following the old 
usage, in accordance with opinion of the Roman Catholic 
Church that after hours of service sports lawful on other 
days were lawful on Sundays, the afternoon of Sundaj^ was 
at first a recognized time for such entertainments ; but this was 
strongly opposed by the Puritans. The corporation of London, 
Puritan in its tendenc} T , battled against the players, and sup- 
ported its case with various arguments : as, desecration of Sab- 
bath and saints' days ; bringing of young people together under 
conditions that would favor the forming of unmeet contracts ; 
temptations from the inns ; chance of seditious matter in the 
plaj's ; idle waste of mone} T , that, if superfluous, should be 
given to the poor ; hurt of people by the fall of scaffolding, 
and by the weapons and gunpowder used in the performances ; 
chance of diffusing plague, by bringing people together in great 



258 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

crowds. In December, 1575, the authorities of the city of 
London prohibited altogether the acting of plays within their 
jurisdiction as ungodly, and made humble suit for like prohibi- 
tion in all places near the city. The queen's players then 
petitioned the Privy Council against the procedure of the 
corporation of London, and of the justices of Middlesex, who 
also had opposed them. The city argued in reply to the players 
"how unseemly it is for youth to run straight from prayer to 
plays, from God's service to the devil's." Among other of 
its suggestions, one was, that since the death-rate, in absence 
of plague, was forty or fifty a week, acting of plaj's in London 
should be forbidden wherever the death-rate exceeded fifty. 
The population of London was then about a hundred and fifty 
thousand. 

In 1576 the city desired that the players should act only in 
private houses, or, if elsewhere, then only on condition that the 
death-rate had for twenty days been under fifty ; that they should 
never act on the Sabbath, nor on holy-days till after evening 
prayer, and always early enough to allow the spectators to re- 
turn home before dark ; also, that none but the queen's players 
should be thus licensed, and that not only the number of these, 
but their names, should be specified. If the}' infringed these 
regulations, there was to be an end of toleration. Hostility of 
the Common Council at last drove the actors into parts of Lon- 
don that were not within its jurisdiction ; and in this year, 1576, 
James Burbadge bought and prepared a place for acting in the" 
precinct of the dissolved monastery in the liberty of Blackfriars. 
There the Blackfriars Theatre was built, in spite of local oppo- 
sition. In these contests the Earl of Leicester was, among 
men in power, the most active supporter of the players. In the 
same year, 1576, two other theatres were built be3'ond the juris- 
diction of the Mayor and Corporation. These were outside the 
walls, in the fresh ah' of Shoreditch, and were called " The 
Theatre " and " The Curtain." These were the other two of 
the three theatres which, in 1576, first gave a home of its own 
to the English drama. William Shakespeare was at Stratford 
then, aged twelve. 

21. Thomas Lodge, son of Sir Thomas Lodge, a London 



ToA.D. 1600.] ANTHONY MUND AY. 259 

grocer, and lord mayor, made for himself a name of honor 
among the men who were creating a poetical drama when 
Shakespeare began his career in London. He was born about 
1558, was a Roman Catholic and a good scholar. From Oxford 
he went to Avignon, where he graduated as doctor of medicine. 
On his return he was incorporated at Cambridge ; and he be- 
came in London not only a successful dramatist and poet, but 
also a thriving physician, with a practice chiefly among those 
of his own religious faith. He wrote novels, pamphlets, son- 
nets, elegies, and at least two plays. The first, " The Wounds 
of Civil War lively set forth in the true tragedies of Marius and 
Sylla," was published in 1594, though written and acted some 
years before that. His other pla}', " A Looking-Glass for Lon- 
don and England," also published in 1594, was written in con- 
junction with Robert Greene. He died in 1G25. 

22. Anthony Munday was a minor writer, whose literary 
activity in verse and prose, as playwright, ballad-writer, and 
pamphleteer, began in 1579, and extended through the rest of 
the reign of Elizabeth, and the whole reign of her successor. 
He died in the reign of Charles I., in 1633. He was bred in 
the English college at Rome, and afterwards turned Protestant. 
His earliest introduction to literature was as a pla3'er and a 
writer for the stage. In 1582 he gave great offence to the Cath- 
olics b}* publishing " The Discoverie of Edmund Campion," 
the Jesuit, which provoked reply. After this he was in the 
service of the Earl of Oxford, and was also a messenger of the 
queen's bedchamber. He had reputation among our first dram- 
atists for skill in the construction of a comic plot. His earliest 
printed book is religious in its tendency ; and so indeed was a 
great part of the drama during Elizabeth's reign. Its title ex- 
plains its purport. It was in verse, and called " The Mirrour 
of Mutabilitie ; or, Principal Part of the Mirrour of Magis- 
trates : Selected out of the Sacred Scriptures." The titles of 
his next two books may be taken as examples of Euphuism ; they 
are both dated in 1580, the year of the second part of Ljdy's 
" Euphues." One is "The Fountaine of Fame, Erected in 
an Orchard of Amorous Adventures ; " the other, "■ The Paine 
of Pleasure, profitable to be perused of the Wise, and necessary 



260 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

to be by the Wanton." Munday took violent interest in the 
arrest and execution of the Jesuits sent by the Pope as devoted 
missionaries for the reconversion of England. We need not 
now read with the pleasure that was taken in the writing of it 
Anthony Munday's " Breefe and True Reporte of the Execu- 
tion of certaine Traytours at Tiborne, the xxviii. and xxx. 
Daves of May, 1582 ; " though we can understand the ground 
of his "Watchwoord to Englande, to beware of Tutors and 
Tretcherous Practises, which have beene the Overthrowe of 
many famous Kingdomes and Commonweales " (1584) ; and see 
the harmon}' between this strength of public feeling and the 
religious temperament which caused him to print in 1586 a book 
of " Godly Exercise for Christian Families, containing an Order 
of Praiers for Morning and Evening, with a little Catechism 
between the Man and his Wife." Such men were of the com- 
mon crowd of English dramatists of Elizabeth's da}', and there 
was a bright spirit of song in them all. Munday's next book, 
which was in 1588, was " A Banquet of Daintie Conceits ; fur- 
nished with verie delicate and choyce Inventions to delighte their 
Mindes who take Pleasure in Musique ; and there withall to sing 
sweete ditties, either to the lute, bandora, virginalles, or anie 
other Instrument." But few of his dramatic writings have been 
preserved: "John a Kent and John a Cumber," produced in 
1595 ; " The Downfall," in 1598 ; " The Death of Robert, Earl 
of Huntington," in 1598; and "First Part of Sir John Old- 
castle," about 1597. Of the last two pla}'s, he was joint author 
with other writers. 

23. Nearly all of this group of early dramatists were univer- 
sity men who were writing for the players. It was pleasant 
work and profitable. Hitherto eveiywhere, and still outside 
the theatre, the man with abilit}' to be useful or pleasant — and 
to be wholesomely pleasant is also to be useful — as a writer 
could not expect to live b}' the use of his pen, unless he re- 
ceived indirect aid from the patronage, or direct aid from the 
purse, of a great lord, or of the sovereign. Without help of the 
patron, or hope of such help, many works of genius could never 
have been written in a world where daily bread costs daily 
ruoney. Such patronage took many gracious forms ; often it 



ToA.D.i6oo.] THE WRITERS OF PLAYS, 261 

was ungracious. It offered only a precarious support, and 
lured sensitive men through years of vain anxiety and hope to 
a sorrowful old age. Spenser described it in his " Mother 
Hubberd's Tale : " 

"So pitiful a thing is suitor's state! 
Most miserable man, whom wicked fate 
Hath brought to court, to sue for had-ywist 
That few have found, and many one hath missed! 
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried, 
What hell it is in suing long to bide: 
To lose good days that might be better spent; 
To waste long nights in pensive discontent; 
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow; 
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow; 
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers' ; 
To have thy asking, yet wait many years; 
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares; 
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs; 
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone." 

But there was no large public of readers, and there was no 
possible escape from the patron till the theatres began to rise. 
Then those who would now be readers became hearers, and 
paid for hearing as they would now pay for reading. From the 
money taken for each performance, there was pa}' to the author, 
pay to the actors ; pay earned as simply and independently by 
the use of a craft, as money earned by carpenter or smith. A 
short experience of this made known to the clever men who 
came to London from the universities to make their way in 
life how the}' could run alone at once, and remain masters of 
themselves. If they chose to seek a patron, they might do that 
also, but the}* were not compelled to feed on hope ; there was 
money for their bread, unless they spent all upon sack. In 
later years, when the stage had a less direct relation to all 
classes of the people, but was itself debased by court patronage, 
this way of escape from the patron became but a narrow one. 
All hope of independence for the men of genius rested then 
upon the slow advance of education, till the readers could do 
gradually, now for one, then for another, and at last for all 
forms of literature, what in Elizabeth's day the hearers did for 



262 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

one form only. The young men thus established in London, 
drawing money from the theatres, could add also to their repu- 
tations and their incomes by writing for the booksellers tales, 
poems, or pamphlets, upon stirring questions of the day. This 
the} T did, and there were some who flung themselves with high 
glee into paper wars, ready to profit in all possible ways by 
skill in the amusement of the town. 

24. G-eorge Peele, a playwright with genius, who belonged 
also to this early group, was born about 1552, a gentleman's son. 
and said to be of a Devonshire family. He became a student 
of the University of Oxford, at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke 
College ; took his degree of B.A. in June. 1577 ; became M.A. 
in 1579. He remained another two years in the university, 
thus having been a student there for nine years, when he 
married a wife with some property, and went to London. 
While in the university he was esteemed as a poet : made an 
English version, now lost, of one of the two Iphigenias of 
Euripides; and probably then wrote his "Tale of Troy." in 
one book of heroic couplets ; but this was first printed in 
1589. In London, Peele took his place, probably at once, 
among the poets. His knowledge caused him to be employed 
in Oxford, in 15S3. as acting manager for two Latin plays, 
by his friend Dr. Gager, presented at Christ Church before 
a Polish prince. His first published verse was prefixed to 
Thomas Watson's ''Passionate Centurie of Love." published 
m 1583. Lie published auoirymouslVr in 1584, ;i The Araygne- 
ment of Paris : a Pastorall, presented before the Queenes Majes- 
tie by the Children of her Chappell." It is a pastoral play in 
five acts, not the less but the more poetical for a childlike 
simplicity of dialogue. It is written at first in various rhymed 
measures, which ran into musical songs, passions, and com- 
plaints that sing themselves ; but the metre becomes blank 
verse when the arraigned shepherd Paris has to defend himself 
before the council of the gods against the charge of unjust judg- 
ment. By way of epilogue, the performers at the end of the 
play poured the good wishes of men and gods on her Majesty 
in two Latin hexameters. About the same time. Peele wrote 
his uninteresting play of " Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes." 



To A.D. 1600.] JOHN LYLY. 263 

In 1593, he wrote the " Famous Chronicle of Edward I. ; " in 
1594, was published anonymously his "Battle of Alcazar;" 
and in 1595, his " Old Wives Tale," a species of farce. Other 
plan's of his are "David and Bethsabe," his masterpiece; 
"Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek," which is lost. 
He also devised two pageants for Lord Mayor's Days, in 1585 
and 1591. When, in 1589, Drake was sent as admiral, with 
Sir John Norris in command of the land forces, to attack the 
Spanish power over Portugal, by making Don Antonio king, 
George Peele sang "A Farewell, entituled to the Famous and 
Fortunate Generalls of our English Forces : Sir John Norris 
and Sir Francis Drake, knights, and all the}T brave and reso- 
lute followers ; " to which he added his " Tale of Troy." He 
died in or before 1598. 

25. John Lyly, whose peculiar influence upon English prose 
style has been already mentioned, has distinction as a drama- 
tist also. He wrote plays for the court on classical or mytho- 
logical subjects, nine pla}-s in all, seven of them being in prose. 
His earliest play, " The Woman in the Moon," is in blank 
verse. A later play ascribed to him, " The Maid's Metamor- 
phosis," is chiefly in rhyme. The prose is labored to the fashion 
of the day ; a Euphuism rich in far-fetched, whimsical, and deli- 
cate conceits, play upon words, and antithesis with alliteration, 
interspersed with songs which now and then are excellent. In 
each play the plot, characters, and dialogues are alike artificial ; 
the poet's aim is not to stir the soul, but to provide a pleasant 
entertainment for the fancy. The first printed of Lyly's plays, 
in 1584, was " Campaspe," plaj'ecl before the queen by her 
Majesty's children, and the children of Paul's. It was acted 
both at court and at the Blackfriars theatre. In the same 
year was printed " Sapho and Phao," which had been played 
before the queen on Shrove-Tuesday, by the children of her 
chapel and the boys of Paul's. lily's comedy of "Mother 
Bombie," acted by the children of Paul's, was first printed in 
1594. Mother Bombie is a fortune-teller, and the scene is laid 
at Rochester ; but the construction of the plot is artificial, and 
even the names of the characters show the relation between 
Plautus and Terence, and the earlier Elizabethan comedy. 



264 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

There are Memphio and Stellio, Prisius and Sperantus, Candius, 
Msestius, Accius, Livia, Serena and Silena, even a " Dromio, 
servant to Memphio," side by side with "Halfpenny, a boy, 
servant to Sperantus." 

26. Robert Greene was novelist as well as dramatist, and 
as a novelist he was a follower of Lyly. He was born at 
Norwich ; educated at St. John's College, Cambridge ; took his 
degree of B.A. in 1578. Peele taking his at Oxford in 1577, 
there probably was little difference between the ages of these 
poets ; though Greene may have been born about 1559 or 1560. 
After 1578, Greene visited Italy and Spain, before graduating 
as M.A. in 1583. In 1584 he published three prose love- 
pamphlets, in the style of Euphues : "The INlyrrour of Mod- 
estie ; " " Morando, the Tritameron of Love ; " and " Gwido- 
nius, the Carde of Fancie." On the title-page of his little 
book of 1585, " Planetomachia," he wrote himself " Student 
in Physicke." In the same }*ear he satisfied the natural in- 
terest of the public in what was, for that time of conflict with 
Catholicism, one of the great topics of the da} T , the death of 
the Pope, by translating through the French, " An Oration, or 
Funerall Sermon, uttered at Roome, at the Buriall of the Holy 
Father, Gregorie the XIII., who departed in Christ Jesus, the 
11th of Aprill, 1585." In this or the next year Greene mar- 
ried. He himself told, in one of his last writings, of the 
vicious wa}' of life into which he had now fallen. Dramatists 
and pla3 T ers enj'03'ed jovial fellowship at the tavern ; the money 
soon earned was soon spent ; temptations pressed on the weak 
will, and more than one fine mind sank under them. Greene's 
wife, a gentleman's daughter, endeavored in vain to part him 
from bad compan} T ; he sa}-s that he spent her marriage-portion, 
and after the birth of a child forsook her ; she going into Lin- 
colnshire, he working on in London, "where in short space I 
fell into favor with such as were of honorable and good calling. 
But here note that though I knew how to get a friend, yet I 
had not the gift or reason how to keep a friend." In these and 
all such words we must not omit to observe that Greene's ob- 
ject in accusing himself was to warn others to keep in the right 
way. He was, like Occleve in one of his poems, seeking to 



To A.D. 1600.] ROBERT GREENE. 265 

win hearts to his cause 03- holding a brief against himself as 
advocate for virtue. But Greene was actually sinking low in 
1590, and within two years of death. His plays remained 
unprinted until after his death. The actors were unwilling 
to chill interest in a play, while it was still upon the stage, 
b}' publication of its dialogue. The date, therefore, of the 
first printing of an}' good Elizabethan pla}', is often much later 
than that of its first performance. Love-pamphlets Greene 
was issuing steadily. In 1587, " Euphues his Censure to 
Philautus " was followed by an "Arcadia." In 1588 he 
printed " Pandosto, the Triumph of Time," the story upon 
which Shakespeare founded#his "Winter's Tale." In the 
same 3'ear followed a collection of stories, poems, and re- 
flections, called " Perimedes, the Blacke-Smith : a Golden 
Methode how to vse the Mind in Pleasant and Profitable Exer- 
cise." If Greene was himself falling from the true standard 
of life, yet to the last he labored to maintain it in his writings. 
"Perimedes " was followed, still in the same year, by " Alcida " 
and " Greene's Metamorphosis ; " and, in 1589, b} r the " Span- 
ish Masquerado," " Tuliie's Love," and "Orpharion." He 
was much occupied during his last years in exposure of the 
cheats of London, by his " Notable Discovery of Coosnage ; " 
also his two parts of " Cone}'-Catching," published in 1591, 
and a third part of " Cone3'-Catching " in the year of his death, 
1592. In his novel of " Never too Late," published in 1590, 
he shadowed his relation to his own wife ; and, in the " Groat's 
Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance," he drew 
from incidents in his own sad life part of the stoiy of a repro- 
bate Roberto. His hero, reduced to a single groat, said, "Oh, 
now it is too late to buy wit with thee ! and therefore will I see 
if I can sell to careless 3'outh what I negligently forgot to bu3\" 
This novel was published after Greene's death, in 1592. He 
died at the house of a poor shoemaker, near Dowgate, to whom 
he owed ten pounds. Under the bond for this mone3 T , he wrote 
to his deserted wife : " Doll, I charge thee, 03- the love of our 
youth and by nry soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid ; 
for if he and his wife had not succored me, I had died in the 
streets." These last lines of his, in Chaucer's stanza, were 
written not long before his death : 



266 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

"Deceiving world, that with alluring toys 

Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn, 

And scornest now to lend thy fading joys 

T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn; 
How well are they that die ere they be born, 

And never see thy sleights, which few men shun 

Till unawares they helpless are undone ! 

" Oft have I sung of Love, and of his fire; 

But now I find that poet was advised 
Which made full feasts increasers of desire, 

And proves weak love was with the poor despised ; 

For when the life with food is not sufficed, 
What thoughts of love, what motion of delight, 
What pleasaunce, can proceed from such a wight ? 

" Witness my want, the murderer of my wit; 

My lavished sense, of wonted fury reft, 
Wants such conceit as should in poems fit 

Set down the sorrow wherein I am left; 

But therefore have high heavens their gifts bereft, 
Because so long they lent them me to use, 
And I so long their bounty did abuse. 

" Oh that a year were granted me to live, 

And for that year my former wits restored! 

What rules of life, what counsel, would I give ! 
How should my sin with sorrow be deplored ! 
But I must die, of every man abhorred : 

Time loosely spent will not again be won ; 

My time is loosely spent, and I undone.'' 

Here also the depths were stirred ; but the earnest spirit of the 
time, and the sweet music it drew from the souls of men, en- 
nobled also the fallen dramatist whom a town ruffian, " Cutting 
Ball," defended from arrest. Among Greene's plays was one, 
written with Thomas Lodge, called u A Looking-Glass for Lon- 
don and England." This was not printed until 1594. In it 
the corruption of Nineveh stood as a figure for the sins of Eng- 
land. Oseas the prophet witnessed and warned from the stage : 

"Look, London, look; with inward eyes behold 
What lessons the events do here unfold. 
Sin grown to pride, to misery is thrall: 
The warning bell is rung, beware to fall." 



To A.D. 1600.] HEXRY CIIETTLE. 267 

At the close of the play the prophet Jonas, who had been call- 
ing on Nineveh to repent, turned to the audience of islanders, 
"whose lands are fattened with the dew of heaven," and ex- 
claimed : 

" O London! maiden of the mistress isle 

Wrapt in the folds and swatliing-clouts of shame, 

In thee more sins than Nineveh contains ! 

Contempt of God; despite of reverend age; 

Neglect of law ; desire to wrong the poor ; 



Thy neighbors burn, yet dost thou fear no fire; 
Thy preachers cry, yet dost thou stop thine ears; 
The 'larum rings, yet sleepest thou secure. 
London, awake, for fear the Lord do frown : 
I set a looking-glass before thine eyes. 
Oh, turn, oh, turn, with weeping, to the Lord, 
And think the prayers and virtues of thy queen 
Defer the plague which otherwise would fall! 
Repent, O London! lest, for thine offence, 
Thy shepherd fail — whom mighty God preserve, 
That she may bide the pillar of His Church 
Against the storms of Romish Antichrist! 
The hand of mercy overshade her head, 
And let all faithful subjects say, Amen." 

Whereupon there arose, it ma}- be, an emphatic " Amen " from 
the playhouse benches ; for although man}' precisians staid 
away, a playhouse audience under Elizabeth represented more 
nearby than it has done at any later time the whole people of 
England. 

There were pla}-s wholly by Greene, on the stories of "Or- 
lando Furioso ; " " Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ; " " George- 
a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield;" " Alphonsus, King of 
Arragon ; " and " Scottish Histoiy of James IV." 

27. His "Groat's Worth of Wit" was published after his 
death by his friend Henry Chettle, a fat and merry dramatist, 
of whose fort} r pla}-s about four remain, and who was a printer 
before he became wholly a playwright. To the " Groat's Worth 
of Wit "there was an appended address from Greene to his 
brother playwrights, Marlowe and Peele, with whom he associ- 
ated Lodge, which includes this reference to Shakespeare : 
"Unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave; 



268 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550 

those puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths, those antics 
garnished in our colors. Is it not strange that I, to whom they 
all have been beholding — is it not like that you, to whom the} T 
all have been beholding — shall, were ye in that case that I am 
now, be both of them at once forsaken? Yea, trust them not ; 
for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, 
with his ' tiger's heart wrapped in a plaj'er's hide,' supposes he 
is as well able to bombast out a blank-verse as the best of you ; 
and, being an absolute Johannes-factotum, is in his own conceit 
the only Shake-scene in a country. Oh that I might entreat 
your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses ; and 
let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more 
acquaint them with your admired inventions ! " 

Here, then, about six years after his coming to London, 
is, in 1592, the first evidence that William Shakespeare has 
worked his way up to success. It is the first and last unkind 
word spoken of him, spoken in bitterness of spirit and in sick- 
ness by a fallen man. A few weeks after the appearance of 
this, Heniy Chettle took occasion, in a publication of his own, 
called " Kind-Heart's Dream," to regret that he had not erased 
what Greene wrote about Shakespeare. "I am so sorry," he 
said, " as if the original fault had been my fault, because 1113'- 
self have seen his demeanor no less civil than he excellent in 
the quality he professes ; besides, divers of worship have re- 
ported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, 
and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art." 

Greene's special reference is to Shakespeare's work upon 
those old pla} T s which are placed among his own as the three 
parts of King Henry VI. " The First Part of Henry VI." is 
doubtless an old play slightry altered and improved bj' Shake- 
speare. " The Second Part of King Henry VI." w T as Shake- 
speare's alteration of a drama, printed in 1594 as " The First 
Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of 
York and Lancaster; " and " The Third Part of King Henry 
VI." was an alteration from " The True Tragedie of Richard 
Duke of Yorke, and the Death of Good King Henrie the Sixt, 
with the whole Contentione betweene the two Houses Lancaster 
and Yorke," first printed in 1595. This was the play that con- 



To A.D. 1600.] CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 269 

tained the line preserved by Shakespeare, and turned against 
him b} T Greene, " O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide " 
(Act i., Scene 4). The line may have been Greene's own, for 
one or two of the plays thus altered may have been written by 
Greene or by Marlowe. 

28. Thomas Kyd, who was of about the same age as 
Greene, and who died about 1594, is chiefly remembered as the 
author of "The Spanish TragedjV acted about 1588, and as 
the probable author of the " First Part of Jeronimo." He also 
translated from the French of Robert Gamier the tragedy of 
"Cornelia." 

29. Thomas Nash graduated at Cambridge in 1585, trav- 
elled in Italy, and probably died about 1600. He is better 
known as a scurrilous and powerful pamphleteer than as a 
dramatist. In the latter capacity he produced at least two 
plays, " The Isle of Dogs " and " Summer's Last Will and 
Testament ; " besides assisting in Marlowe's " Dido, Queen of 
Carthage." Another pla}-, now lost, " See Me or See Me Not," 
is attributed to him. 

30. Christopher Marlowe, who advanced the Elizabethan 
drama to the point from which Shakespeare rose to the supreme 
heights of poetr} T , was but two months older than Shakespeare ; 
born at Canterbury in Shakespeare's birth-year, 1564, one of 
several children of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and clerk of 
St. Mary's. He was educated first at the King's School, Can- 
terbury, and then at Corpus Christi (Benet) College, Cam- 
bridge. For his university education he must have been 
indebted to the kindness of some liberal man who had observed 
his genius.' He did not go with a scholarship from the King's 
School. He graduated as B.A. in 1583, as M.A. in 1587; 
and he died on the 1st of June, 1593, stabbed in the eye by 
Francis Archer, who was defending himself in a brawl after a 
feast at Deptford. 

By the year 1587, when he took his master's degree, Mar- 
lowe had achieved great success at a stroke with his play of 
" Tamburlaine the Great." The theme, like the grievance of 
M} T cetes, with which it opened, required " a great and thunder- 
ing speech," and Marlowe did not, like Mycetes, find himself 



270 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1550 

" insufficient to express the same." The old British public had 
enjoyed for centuries, in Herod of the miracle-plays, the char- 
acter of a pompous braggart, who could rant well. In one of 
the sets of plays Herod's speeches were crowded with words 
that began with "r,"for greater convenience of r-r-rolling 
them well in his mouth. Marlowe gave them a Tamburlaine 
who could out-herod Herod, and he roared Marlowe into sudden 
fame. The desire indeed was so great to hear him roar, that 
Marlowe let him roar again, and maintained his success by the 
production of a " Second Part of Tamburlaine." The two 
parts were first printed in 1590, without author's name. These 
plays were founded on the stoiy of Tamerlane, or Timour the 
Tartar, who, after leading his countiymen to their own deliver- 
ance from foreign oppression, was crowned at Samarcand in 
1370, and presently set forth on a career of conquest. In 1402, 
he made the great Ottoman sultan, Bajazet, his prisoner. He 
had set out in winter weather, at the age of seventy, for the 
addition of China to his conquests, when he died. In the em- 
bodiment of this notion of an all-devouring conqueror, " the 
scourge of God," Marlowe used the blank-verse, which had 
not then secured its footing on the public stage. Our first tra- 
ged} T was in that new measure ; but it was written for Christmas 
entertainment at the Inner Temple. Blank- verse was used in 
the last two acts of " The Arraignment of Paris ; " but that was 
written for the queen and court. The pla}'s for the public were 
in prose or rhyme, till the Prologue of Tamburlaine said to the 
people : 

" From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threaten the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword." 

Marlowe, by his " Tamburlaine," and by the better plays 
which followed it, developed blank-verse as the measure for 
English dramatic poetry, made its worth felt, and was among 
dramatists the first cause of its general adoption. 

"Tamburlaine" is rant glorified. It was enjoyed even by 



To A.D. 1600.] CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 271 

those who laughed at it. The boldest stroke was in the open- 
ing of the fourth Scene of the fourth Act of Part II. " Enter 
Taraburlaine, drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizond 
and S}Tia with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, and 
in his right hand a whip with which he scourgeth them." 

" Holla, ye pamper' cl jades of Asia! 
What ! can ye draw but twenty miles a day, 
And have so proud a chariot at your heels, 
And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine ? " 

Marlowe's " Tragical History of Doctor Faustus " probably 
appeared on the stage in 1589, in blank-verse intermixed with 
scenes of prose ; but it was not printed in the lifetime of its 
author. It represents the highest point reached by the Eliza- 
bethan drama before 1590. Shakespeare, who had come un- 
known and poor among the dramatists and actors, with creden- 
tials from no university, was then quietly and surely working 
his way up. Bound to the truth of nature, he could not rise 
by an audacity like that of Marlowe, who in 1590 had a higher 
public reputation. In 1589, Shakespeare was one of the six- 
teen sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre, an actor and a working 
pla3'wright, ready at an}' time to mend and alter old pla}-s for 
revival, or to do what else he could for the general welfare of 
the compan}-. 

Marlowe's "Jew of Malta " gives in Barabas a powerful pic- 
ture of the Jew maligned still by the mediaeval prejudices of 
the Christians. Marlowe's "Edward the Second" was the 
nearest approach made b}' the }^ear 1590 to a play in which 
there is a natural development of character. The last and 
worst of Marlowe's plaj's, and the one that was most carelessly 
printed, is his " Massacre at Paris," which dramatized the 
strife in France. It included not only the Massacre of St. 
Bartholomew, but also the death of Charles IX., the assassina- 
tion of the Duke of Guise by Hemy III., and the assassination 
of Henry himself b}- the Dominican friar, Jacques Clement, 
with the succession of Henry of Navarre to the French throne. 
The clying Hemy III. in the last scene of the play breathed 
vengeance against the Pope, and said : 



272 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1550. 

" Navarre, give me thy hand: T here do swear 
To ruinate this wicked Church of Rome, 
That hatcheth up such bloody practices; 
And here protest eternal love to thee, 
And to the Queen of England especially, 
Whom God hath blessed for hating Popery." 

Iii the last lines of the play Henry of Navarre vowed so to 
revenge his predecessor's death, 

" That Rome, and all those popish prelates there, 
Shall curse the time that e'er Navarre was king, 
And rul'd in France by Henry's fatal death." 

A traged} T of " Dido, Queen of Carthage," left unfinished by 
Marlowe, was completed by his friend Thomas Nash, and acted 
by the children of her Majesty's chapel. Marlowe made a 
poor version of " Ovid's Elegies," first published in 1596 with 
the Epigrams of John Davies. His beginning of a free para- 
phrase of the " Hero and Leander " ascribed to Musseus was 
afterwards completed by George Chapman. 

During the last }'ears of the sixteenth century there had risen 
in England other poets and prose-writers of distinction, — 
Shakespeare, Dra}'ton, Daniel, Ben Jonson, He} T wood, Middle- 
ton, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, Joseph Hall, Francis Bacon, 
Walter Raleigh, and Camden ; but as their careers had their 
highest development in the next period, we defer our study of 
them till we come to the study of that time. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH 
CENTURY. 






William Shakespeare. 
Ben Jonson. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 
George Chapman. 
Thomas Heywood. 
Thomas Middleton. 
Thomas Dekker. 



Samuel Daniel. 
Michael Drayton. 
William Browne. 



DRAMATISTS. 

John Marston. 
William Alexander. 
Cyril Tourneur. 
William Rowley. 
Nathaniel Field. 
Philip Massinger. 
John Webster. 

POETS. 

Giles Fletcher. 
Phineas Fletcher. 
George Wither. 



John Ford. 
James Shirley. 
Thomas May. 
Jasper Mayne. 
Thomas Randolph. 
Sir William Davenant. 



William Drummond- 
John Milton. 



LATER EUPHUISTS IN POETRY. 



John Donne. 
Thomas Coryat. 



John Taylor. 
Francis Quarles. 



| George Herbert. 
I Richard Crashj.w. 



CHARACTER POETS. 
Sir Thomas Overbury. I William Habington. I John Earle. 



George Chapman. 



POETIC TRANSLATORS. 

I George Sandys. I Barten Holyday. 



WITS, SATIRISTS, AND SONG-WRITERS. 

Joseph Hall. 
Sir John Harington. 
Richard Corbet. 
John Cleveland. 



Thomas Carew. 
Sir John Denham. 
Sir John Suckling. 
William Cartwright. 



Richard Lovelace. 
Robert Herrick. 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS. 



King James I. 
Robert Burton. 
Lancelot Andrewes. 
James Usher. 
John Selden. 
Sir Henry Wotton. 
John Hales. 



Francis Bacon. 
John Napier. 



John Lightfoot. 
Sir Henry Spelman. 
John Hayward. 
William Camden. 
John Speed. 
Samuel Purchas. 
Sir Walter Raleigh. 

MEN OF SCIENCE. 



Richard Knolles. 
Alexander Ross. 
Lord Herbert of Cher- 
bury. 
John Spottiswoode. 
David Calderwood. 
Thomas Fuller. 



William Harvey. 
John Wilkins. 



Samuel Hartlib. 
John Waliis. 



RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL 
WRITERS. 



Owen Feltham. 
Henry More. 
Richard Sibbes. 
Jeremy Taylor. 



William Prynne. 
Peter Heylin. 
William Chillingworth. 
Philip Hunton. 



Sir Robert Filmer. 
John Gauden. 
John Milton. 



CHAPTER IV. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 
DRAMATIC LITERATURE: SHAKESPEARE, HIS 
CONTEMPORARIES, AND IMMEDIATE SUCCES- 
SORS. 

1. English Writers in the Early Tears of the Centnry. — 2. William Shakespeare.— 
3. Ben Jonson. — 4. Beaumont and Fletcher. — 5. George Chapman; Thomas 
Heywood. — 6. Thomas Middleton. — 7. Thomas Dekker. — 8. John Marston.— 
9. William Alexander. — 10. Cyril Tourneur. — 11. William Rowley. — 12. 
5athaniel Field. — 13. Phiiip Massinger; John Webster. — 14. John Ford; 
James Shirley. — 15. Thomas May. — 16. Jasper Mayne. — 17. Thomas Ran- 
dolph. — 18. Sir William Davenant. 

1. When Elizabeth died, on the 24th of March, 1603, and James VI. 
of Scotland became James I. of England, Shakespeare was thirty-nine 
years old, and Bacon forty-two. Spenser had been dead about four years, 
Richard Hooker three. Robert Greene had been dead about eleven 
years, and Christopher Marlowe ten. George Peele was dead, and 
Thomas Nash had been dead about three years. Thomas Sackville, the 
author of our first tragedy, now Lord Buckhurst, aged sixty-seven, was 
one of those who, after the queen's death, administered the affairs of 
the kingdom, and proclaimed King James. A year later Sackville was 
created Earl of Dorset, and he died in 1G0S. John Lyly, author of 
"Euphues," was living at the accession of James L, fifty years old, and 
had three years to live. Gabriel Harvey, aged about forty-eight, lived 
throughout James's reign, a Doctor of Civil Law, practising as advocate 
in the Prerogative Court. Thomas Lodge, aged forty-five, lived on, as a 
physician in good practice. John Stow was about seventy-eight years 
old, and "as a recompense for his labors and travel of forty-five years in 
setting forth the chronicles of England, and eight years taken up in the 
survey of the cities of London and Westminster, towards his relief now 
in his old age," he asked for, and obtained, the king's letters-patent 
empowering him "to gather the benevolence of well-disposed people 
within this realm of England ; to ask, gather, and take the alms of all 
our loving subjects." He lived only till 1605 on this boundless reward 
of his enthusiasm. 

Among men who had written in the past reign there also were still 
alive: Richard Stanihurst, aged about fifty-eight; William Camden, 

275 



276 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

fifty-two; Sir Walter Raleigh, fifty-one : Anthony Munday. fifty : Geoige 
Chapman, forty-six; William Warner, forty-five; Samuel Daniel, forty- 
one; Michael Drayton, forty; Joseph Hall, twenty-nine: Ben Jonson, 
thirty; and Marston, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker. of about Ben Jon- 
son's age. 

Among the dramatists born in the reign of Elizabeth who began to 
write under the Stuarts, there were, at the accession of James I. : John 
Fletcher, twenty-seven years old; Francis Beaumont, seventeen: John 
Webster, perhaps twenty-three: Cyril Tourneur, perhaps twenty; Philip 
Massinger, nineteen; John Ford, seventeen; James Shirley, seven 
These were Stuart dramatists, and not Elizabethan. But they were bom 
in Elizabeth's reign, and their plays retain much of the Elizabethan 
character. 

2. William Shakespeare was the great living writer at 
the accession of James I., when his company became that of 
the King's Players instead of the Lord Chamberlain's. He 
was born at Stratforcl-011-Avon. in April. 1564 . perhaps on 
the 23d of April, for he was baptized on the 26th. There is 
a tradition that he died on his birthday, and he died on the 23d 
of April, 1616. His father was John Shakespeare, a glover in 
Henley Street, and probably the son of Richard Shakespeare, 
farmer, at Snitterfield. Probably in 1557 John Shakespeare 
married Mary, the youngest daughter of Eobert Arden. of 
Wilmcote, "husbandman." Her father had died a month 
before the marriage, leaving to Mary by his will a small prop- 
erty at TTilmcote, called Ashbies, of about fifty-four acres, with 
two houses, and interest in other land at TVilineote : also two 
tenements at Snitterfield. and £6 135. 4cZ. in cash. That was 
Mary Arden's fortune, and it helped John Shakespeare for some 
years ; but he was an unprosperous man. and during all the years 
of the boyhood and youth of his illustrious son he was sinking 
steadily into debt and poverty. In 1582. that son then eigh- 
teen years old. apparently with no means of gaining a liveli- 
hood, was married to Anne Hathaway, then twenty-six years 
old, the daughter of a husbandman of the neighborhood who 
had been dead about a year. There is no evidence whatever 
that this marriage was other than a happy one. In the year 
1586, when William Shakespeare was twenty-two. he had a 
wife and three children to support. How could he best main- 
tain them? He was a poet. Players had been to Stratford. 



To A.D. 1650.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 277 

He would go to London, and would seek his fortune by steady 
work in association with the rising power of the stage. 

His wife and babies he would not take with him into the un- 
wholesome atmosphere of the great town, or bring into contact 
with the wild life of the playhouse wits. The children would 
be drawing health from the fresh breezes of Stratford ; the wife 
would be living a wholesome life among her old friends, neigh- 
bors, and relations ; while he worked hard for them where money 
could be earned, took holiday rests with them when theatres 
were closed, and hoped that he might earn enough to enable 
him to come home for good before he was very old, and live a 
natural and happy life among the quiet scenes of his birthplace, 
among relatives who loved him, and among the old friends of 
his childhood and his youth. The man of highest genius is the 
man also of highest sanity. In lower minds unusual excite- 
ment of the brain may lead to bold or eccentric forms of expres- 
sion, with half-bred resemblance to originality and energy of 
thought. Ephemeral and even lasting reputations may be 
founded on this form of wit ; but the greatest among poets, a 
Chaucer or a Shakespeare, is calm and simply wise. He is 
greatest of poets not because he does not, but because he does 
feel, and that more intensely and more truly than his neighbors, 
the natural ties of life. He has keen happiness in the home 
circle, in the scenes associated with his childhood, in the peace- 
ful fellowship of man. His old friends, Judith and Hamnet 
Sadler, the bakers, were more, not less, to the author of " King 
Lear ' ' than they would be to the citizen with less perception of 
the harmonies of life. Of all that it is natural and fit for com- 
mon men to say and do, Shakespeare had, because of his tran- 
scendent genius, only a simpler, truer sense than any of his 
neighbors. 

Shakespeare came to London, then, in or about the year 
1586 ; and, Shakespeare though he was, he did not leap to in- 
stant fame, but worked his way to a front place in his profession 
by six years of patient industay. He was so ready to do any 
honest work, that at the end of six years we have the first indi- 
cation of his rise in the complaint of a competitor, that he is a 
Johannes Factotum (Jack of all Trades) . This was the posi- 



278 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

tion of William Shakespeare in 1590, when he was twenty-six 
years old. In studying Shakespeare's life it is needful to dis- 
tinguish firmly between facts of which there is evidence, and 
idle fancies : as of Shakespeare having in his } T outh stolen deer 
from a park in which there were no deer to be stolen ; of his 
having been a butcher, and, when he killed a calf, having done 
so with a grand air ; with other small- talk of dead gossips. In 
1593, the year of the death of Marlowe, Shakespeare had not 
yet produced any of his greatest pla} T s. The plays of his own 
then written were " The Two Gentlemen of Verona " (1591?), 
" The Comedy of Errors " (1592?), probably also " Love's La- 
bour's Lost." In 1593 he first appeared in print b} T publishing 
his " Venus and Adonis," a poem in the six-lined stanza then 
used as the common measure for a strain of love. It was dedi- 
cated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who in 1593 
was twenty years old ; the age of Shakespeare being twenty-nine. 
The } T oung earl, a ward of Lord Burghley's, had been educated 
at Cambridge, where he took his degree of M.A. in 1589 ; he 
then came to London, joined an Inn of Court, was in favor with 
the queen, and was a liberal friend of the poets. In his dedi- 
cation of it to Lord Southampton, Shakespeare called "Venus 
and Adonis " the " first heir of my invention." To the same 
patron Shakespeare dedicated in the following year, 1594, his 
" Lucrece," in Chaucer's stanza — " Troilus verse." The two 
poems, one of the passion of love, one of heroic chastity, be- 
long together, and their sweet music spread over the land that 
once had been filled with the songs of Chaucer. Of the " Venus 
and Adonis " there were six editions before the close of Eliza- 
beth's reign. u Titus Andronicus," a play ascribed to Shake- 
speare, but certainly a piece from another hand which he but 
slightly touched (in an older form it had been called " Titus 
and Vespasian"), seems to have been first acted in January, 
1594. 

About 1594 the Blackfriars Company built, as a summer thea- 
tre, the Globe, on Bankside. It was a wooden hexagon, circular 
within, and open to the weather ; but the stage was sheltered 
by some roofing. London Bridge was the one bridge of that 
time, and playgoers crossed to the Bankside theatres by water 



To A.D. 1650.J WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 279 

from various parts of London. Sunday performances had been 
abolished for the last ten years. The}' had been strongly 
opposed. On the 13th January, 1583, in Paris Garden — an 
old place of entertainment, where beasts had been baited early 
in Henry VIII.' s reign — during performance on the sabbath, 
a decayed wooden gallery fell down, and many lives were lost. 
This was looked upon as a judgment from Heaven, and the 
Privy Council thenceforth enforced an order that the actors 
should t{ forbear wholly to play on the Sabbath-day, either in 
the forenoon or afternoon, which to do they are by their lord- 
ships' order expressly denied and forbidden." But there was 
now no want of audiences on other days. Having built the 
Globe, the Blackfriars Company, to which Shakespeare be- 
longed, proceeded in 1596, not without opposition, to repair 
and enlarge the Blackfriars ; and after this the children of her 
Majesty's chapel acted at Blackfriars when the adult company 
was acting at the Globe. In 1596, Shakespeare buried at 
Stratford his only son Hamnet, twelve years old. A grant of 
arms to his father in that year (about which there was another 
note in 1599) indicates that the poet was then prospering. 
In 1597, three plays of his were published in quarto, " Rich- 
ard II.," iw Richard III.," and " Romeo and Juliet." Those 
plan's of Shakespeare which were printed in his lifetime were in 
quarto form, and are known to students as the earl}' quartos. 
They were not corrected by the author. In Easter term of the 
same year, 1597, Shakespeare began to form the home in his 
native town to which he had looked forward. He bought for 
sixty pounds New Place, the best house in the line of the main 
street of the town, with two barns and two gardens behind, in 
the direction of the Avon. In the same year, also, while 
Shakespeare was establishing this home for himself in Stratford, 
he was helping his father and mother ; for there was a bill filed 
in chancery by John Shakespeare and his wife to recover Ash- 
bies from John, the son of Edward Lambert. There is also 
other evidence that by this time Shakespeare's prudent manage- 
ment, and his success in London, had enabled him — the first 
man in our literature who did so — to save money earned, not 
indirectly, by the free use of his genius. A record, dated 



280 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

October, 1598, shows him to have been assessed on property in 
the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate. The plays of his printed 
in quarto, in 1598, were " Love's Labour's Lost " and " Part I. 
of King Henry IV.," but there is other evidence to show what 
plays of Ms had by that date been acted. 

In 1598, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, Francis Meres, 
in his " Wit's Treasury," publicly proclaimed William Shake- 
speare to be the chief living poet and dramatist of England. 
He was then thirtj'-four years old ; he had been at work in Lon- 
don for about twelve }~ears, of which the first six had been years 
of patient upward struggle, and the other six had been } T ears 
of increasing power and prosperity. He had written chronicle 
plays, in which his Muse did " like himself heroically sound ; " 
had dealt playfully in " Love's Labour's Lost " with the Euphu- 
ism of his time ; had found out the marvellous wealth of his 
imagination, "glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to 
heaven," in the "Midsummer Night's Dream;" had shown 
in "Romeo and Juliet" the innocent beauty of }'oung love 
breathing its harmonies among the petty feuds and hatreds of 
mankind ; and in the " Merchant of Venice " he had risen to a 
pure expression of that spirit of religion, which, for many in his 
time, was obscured by passions of the conflict between creed and 
creed. What the Capulets and Montagues meant in " Romeo 
and Juliet," the Jew and Christian meant in the " Merchant of 
Venice ; ' ' but in that pla}- the central thought to which eveiy 
scene relates gave prominence to the relation between Slrylock 
and Antonio. 

When he had done his prentice work, and become master 
of his craft, every play of Shakespeare's became a true poem, 
and had the spiritual unity that is in every great work of art. 
Each play has its own theme in some essential truth of life, 
which is its soul expressed in action, and with which every 
detail is in exquisite accord. 

hi 1599 appeared an improved edition of "Romeo and 
Juliet ; " likewise " The Passionate Pilgrim," a small collection 
of love-poems, all ascribed on the title-page, hy an adventurous 
publisher, to Shakespeare, who objected to this use of his name. 
The volume includes, with pieces by Shakespeare, others which 
it is known that he did not write. 



To A.D. 1650.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 281 

In 1600 the plays of Shakespeare first printed in quarto were 
" The Merchant of Venice," " A Midsummer Night's Dream," 
" Much Ado About Nothing," " Second Part of Henry IV.," 
and "Henry V." 

" The Merry Wives of Windsor " was the only play of Shake- 
speare's printed in 1602. There was a tradition current at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century that this was w r ritten at the 
request of Queen Elizabeth, who was so much pleased with 
Falstaff in the two parts of " King He my IV.," that she com- 
manded a play upon Falstaff in love ; being, moreover, in such 
haste for it, that it was to be written in fourteen days. This 
may or ma}' not be true. " The Diary of John Manningham," 
a member of the Middle Temple, makes known to us that 
Shakespeare's " Twelfth Night " was acted in the Middle Tem- 
ple on the 2d of February, 1602. In that year " Venus and 
Adonis " reached a sixth edition. It seems to have been in the 
earlier part of this year, 1602, that Shakespeare's "Hamlet " 
was first acted. It was entered by a bookseller on the Station- 
ers' Register on the 26th of July, 1602. 

In Ma}*, 1602, Shakespeare continued the investment of his 
earnings in his native place, by buying of William and John 
Combe a hundred and seven acres of arable land, in the parish 
of Old Stratford, for three hundred and twenty-seven pounds ; 
and later in the year he made two more purchases, one of a cot- 
tage and its ground near New Place, the other, for sixty pounds, 
of a messuage with two barns, two gardens, and two orchards. 
He was extending his grounds behind New Place towards the 
river. 

The plays produced by Shakespeare in the reign of James 
I., and their probable dates, were "Othello," perhaps; — 
it was played at Court Nov. 1, 1604; — and " Measure for 
Measure," performed in December, 1604 ; " Macbeth," early 
in 1606; "King Lear," acted before James, Dec. 26, 1606 
(first printed, 1608) ; " Pericles " (on work by another hand), 
1607 or 1608 (first printed, 1609) ; "Antony and Cleopatra," 
1608; "Troilus and Cressida," early in 1609, of which two 
editions were printed in that year, one of them before the 
play had been acted. There were no more of Shakespeare's 



282 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

plays printed in quarto during his life. ' ' Cymbeline " was 
probably first acted about 1609 ; " Coriolanus " and " Tinion 
of Athens," 1610. The earliest notice of a performance of 
the " Tempest" is in 1611. It is one of Shakespeare's latest 
plays, perhaps his last, and there may be a reference to this 
in Prospero's breaking of his wand, burning of his books, and 
departure from the magic island. The notion of the pla} T is, 
indeed, that man, supreme in intellect, master of the powers 
of earth and air, yet yearns for and needs the natural life 
with its affections. Bad as the world might be, and ill as it 
had used him, Prospero brought it to his island, with all its 
incidental treacheries and all its incidental grossness, bound 
himself with it again, and went home to it. Shakespeare felt 
only more keenly than his neighbors all the ties of home and 
kindred. He had been using the profits from his art to make 
himself a home at Stratford, and, while he had still power to 
enjo} T the home-life that he had denied himself in part while 
he was earning, he broke his magic rod, and went home finally 
to his wife and children when his age was about forty-eight. 
" King Henry VIII." was the play being acted when the Globe 
Theatre was burnt down, June 29, 1613, 03- the discharge of 
" chambers " in Act i. Scene 4. Because Sir Henry Wotton 
speaks of the play then acted as " a new pkry, called ' All is 
True,'" some think that Shakespeare's career closed with the 
production of " Henry VIIL," in 1613. It has been said also 
that Shakespeare's versification falls into three periods : an 
earl} T period, in which he seldom took liberties with the metre 
of his ten-syllabled line ; a second period, in which eleven- S3I- 
labled lines are more frequent ; and a late period, in which he 
used much greater freedom. In " Henry VIIL" extra syllables 
are more frequent than in any other pla}-, and so distinctly 
marked, that thej' are not seldom monosjilables. This pecul- 
iarity was introduced deliberately. It is strongly marked in the 
most characteristic passages, as in the speech of Buckingham 
before his execution, and in Wolse} T 's farewell to his greatness. 
The pomp of the heroic line is broken at its close, and falls 
succeed each other, making a sad music in harmony with the 
feeling of the scene and of the play. For the whole play is a 



To A.D. 1650. | WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 283 

lesson on the changing fortunes of men and their one trust in 
God. Henry VIII. stands in the centre as the earthly Fortune 
by whose smile or frown earthly prosperit} r is gained or lost ; 
scene after scene shows rise and fall of human fortunes as of 
waves of the great sea, and each fall — Buckingham's, Kather- 
ine's, "Wolsey's — leads to the same thought : 

" Farewell 
The hopes of Court! My hopes in heaven do dwell.'' 

The play is as true as any sermon could be to such a text on 
the world and its pomps as this from the 39th Psalm : " Man 
walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain ; he 
heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. 
And now, Lord, what is 1113' hope? truly my hope is even in 
thee." 

Shakespeare's " Sonnets," mentioned by Meres in 1598, were 
first published in 1609. The\~ are a hundred and fifty-four in 
number, and their chief theme is friendship. Various attempts 
have been made to build sentimental theories upon the sonnets 
of Shakespeare, as upon those of Surrey and of Sidney. From 
what has been said in former chapters of the character of 
sonnet-writing, from its origin to the Elizabethan time, it will 
be understood that I have here nothing to do but indorse 
(dropping its "well-nigh") the opinion arrived at b}' one of 
the most thorough Shakespeare students of our time, Mr. Dyce, 
who says, " For my own part, repeated perusals of the ' Son- 
nets ' have well-nigh convinced me that most of them were 
composed in an assumed character on different subjects, and 
at different times, for the amusement, if not at the suggestion, 
of the author's intimate associates (hence described b}' Meres 
as 4 his sugared sonnets among his private friends ') ; and though 
I would not deny that one or two of them reflect his genuine 
feelings, I contend that allusions scattered through the whole 
series are not to be hastily referred to the personal circum- 
stances of Shakespeare." The}' are exquisite little pieces, 
not in the true sonnet measure, but w 7 ith a form of their own ; 
for each of them consists merelv of three four-lined stanzas of 
alternate rhyme with a couplet added. Spenser's sonnets keep 
to the five rhymes, and although the}' have their own method 



284 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. iCco 

of interlacement, it is one in full accord with the nature of this 
kind of poem. In a sonnet of Shakespeare's there are seven 
rhymes. It is in fact simply a little poem in three four-lined 
stanzas and a couplet. 

Shakespeare had prepared for retirement by an investment 
which would cause him to draw even a main part of his income 
from his native place. This was the purchase, in 1605, of a 
moiety of a lease granted in 1544 for ninety-two years — there- 
fore, with thirty-one years yet to run — of the tithes, great and 
small, of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. 
The price paid for this was four hundred and forty pounds, and 
the tithes would produce him sixty pounds a year, an income 
with the buying power of, say, three hundred or four hundred 
pounds a year at the present value of money. In 1607, on 
the 5th of June, Shakespeare married his elder daughter. 
Susanna, to John. Hall, a prosperous medical practitioner at 
Stratford. In February, 1608, the birth of Mrs. Hall's only 
child, Elizabeth, made Shakespeare a grandfather ; and in 
September of that year his mother died. In 1612, at which 
time probably, Shakespeare had retired to New Place, he was 
en°:ao-ed in a lawsuit arising out of his share of the tithes. His 
brother Richard died in February, 1613. A month afterwards 
he bought a house near the Blackfriars Theatre for a hundred 
and forty pounds, pajing eight}' pounds and mortgaging for 
the rest, then paying the mortgage off, and leasing the house 
to John Robinson. In June of the same year, 1613, the Globe 
Theatre was burnt down while " Henry VIII." was being acted. 
but he seems then to have had no share in the property. In 
1614 Shakespeare was active, with others of his neighborhood, 
in protecting the rights to common lands near Stratford against 
an enclosure scheme. In 1615 he was still interested in the 
enclosure question. In 1616 he married his other daughter, 
Judith, to Thomas Quine} r , a vintner and wine-merchant at 
Stratford, who was four 3'ears j'ounger than herself. Shake- 
speare had given directions for his will 'in the preceding Janu- 
ary, but it was executed on the 25th of March. He died on 
the 23d of the following April, 1616, aged fifty-two. An after- 
thought of a bequest to his wife of " the second best bed " has 



To A.D. 1650. 1 BEN JONSON. 285 

been weakly taken as evidence of want of affection. It would 
be at least as reasonable to say, that, as the best bed in most 
houses is that of the guest-chamber, the second best becomes 
that of the husband and wife, and the special bequest was, 
therefore, dictated b} T a feeling of domestic tenderness. 

Shakespeare's wife survived until 1623. That was the 3-ear 
in which his plays were first collected in a folio, as " Mr. 
William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. 
Published according to the True Original! Copies." The other 
three folios appeared in 1632, 1663 (with "Pericles" and six 
spurious plays added, namely, "The London Prodigal," "The 
History of Thomas Lord Cromwell," " Sir John Oldcastle Lord 
Cobham," "The Puritan Widow," "A Yorkshire Tragedy," 
and the " Tragedy of Locrine "), and 1685 (also including the 
spurious plays) . 

3. Of the dramatists who rose around Shakespeare, the 
ablest was Ben Jonson. He was of a North country family, 
son of a gentleman who was ruined by religious persecution in 
the reign of Mary, who became a preacher in Elizabeth's reign, 
and who died a month before the poet's birth, in 1573. Ben 
Jonson's mother took a bricklayer for second husband, and at 
some time during Ben's childhood she was living in Hartshorn 
Lane, near Charing Cross. The boy was first taught in the 
parish school of St. Martin's, and then owed to the kindness 
of William Camden an admission to Westminster School. He 
is said to have tried his stepfather's business for a little while, 
before he went to fight against Spain as a volunteer in the Low 
Countries. When he came home he joined the players and mar- 
ried. In 1597 he was a sharer in the company of the Rose at 
Bankside. In these early da}'s, according to the opinion of some 
writers, Ben Jonson acted the old Marshal Jeronimo in Thomas 
Kyd's " Spanish Tragedy," and likewise enriched the play with 
an effective scene between mad old Jeronimo and a painter, in 
the manner of the earlier Elizabethan drama. In 1596 Ben 
Jonson's comedy, " Every Man in his Humour " was produced, 
with Italian characters and a scene laid at Florence. He then 
revised it, made the characters all English, and laid the scene 
in and between Coleman Street and Hoxton. In this, its pres- 



286 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. f A.D. 1600 

ent shape, it was performed in 1598 by the company to which 
Shakespeare belonged, the name of Shakespeare himself stand- 
ing at the head of the list of actors. "Every Man in his 
Humour" is a true comedy carefully constructed. Its action, 
contained within a single day, opens at six in the morning, and 
ends with a supper. The course of time is unobtrusively but 
exactly marked as the story proceeds ; and the plot is not only 
contrived to show varieties of character, each marked b} T a spe- 
cial humor or predominance of one peculiar qualit}*, but the 
incidents are run ingeniously into a dramatic knot which the 
fifth act unties. But Ben Jonson's next three pla}'s were of 
another character ; the} 7 were not so much true comedies as 
bright dramatic satires, based on a noble sense of life and of 
the poet's place in it. " Eveiy Man out of his Humour, " 
produced in 1599, "Cynthia's Revels," in 1600, and "The 
Poetaster," in 1601, were annual satires; the first touching 
especially the citizens, the second the courtiers, and the third 
the poets, in as far as an} T of these lived for aims below the 
dignity of manhood. Ben Jonson was at that time of his life 
tall, meagre, large-boned, with a pock-marked face and eager 
eyes ; a poet and keen satirist, with a true reverence for all 
that was noble, a lofty sense of the aims of literature, and a 
young zeal to set the world to rights, with a bold temper and 
an over-readiness for self-assertion. In "Cynthia's Revels" 
he jested scornfully at the Euphuisms and shallow graces of the 
court, at lives spent in the mere study of airs and grimaces. 
"Would any reasonable creature," he asked through one of 
his characters, " make these his serious studies and perfections, 
much less only live to these ends, to be the false pleasure of a 
few, the true love of none, and the just laughter of all? " He 
urged for the court idlers, in words characteristic of the mind 
that made him, next to Shakespeare, foremost among English 
dramatists : 

" That these vain joys, in which their wills consume 

Such powers of wit and soul as are of force 

To raise their beings to eternity, 

May he converted on works fitting men; 

And, for the practice of a forced look, 

An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase, 



To A.D. 1650.] BEN JONSON. 287 

Study the native frame of a true heart, 

An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge, 

And spirit that may conform them actually 

To God's high figures, which they have in power." 

When Dekker and Marston considered themselves to have been 
pointed at in the " Poetaster," the} r resolved to give a taste of 
his own whip to the too ardent satirist, whose vivid impersona- 
tions of the follies of soeiet}' were looked upon as personal 
attacks by all the men in whom such follies were conspicuous. 
Dekker wrote his u Satiromastix " (whip for the satirist), and 
it was acted as a retort on Jonson's "Poetaster." But al- 
though Ben Jonson's own admirable bull}*, Captain Tucca, was 
reproduced and let loose upon him to abuse him roughly, }et 
through the characters of Demetrius and Crispinus, b} r whom 
Dekker and Marston held themselves to have been attacked, 
and who were also reproduced, the retort was made in a tone 
that showed the quarrel to be, as a Latin motto to the printed 
book expressed, among friends only. The motto said, "I 
speak only to friends, and that upon compulsion." One pas- 
sage will serve as sufficient evidence of this. Ben Jonson, as 
Horace Junior, is made to plead for his satires of citizens and 
others : 

-- Horace. What could I do, out of a just revenge, 
But bring them to the stage ? They envy me, 
Because I hold more worthy company. 

" Demetrius. Good Horace, no. My cheeks do blush for thine 
As often as thou speaks' t so. Where one true 
And nobly virtuous spirit for thy best part 
Loves thee, I wish one ten with all my heart. 
I make account I put up as deep share 
In any good man's love which thy worth earns 
As thou thyself. We envy not to see 
Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesie. 
No, here the gall lies, we that know what stuff 
Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk 
On which thy learning grows, and can give life 
To thy (once dying) baseness, yet must we 
Dance antics on your paper — 

" Horace. Fannius — 

" Crispinus. This makes us angry, but not envious. 
No, were thy warpt soul put in a new mould, 
I'd wear thee as a jewel set in gold." 



288 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

In that spirit Dekker resolved to let his eager, positive friend 
Ben feel in his own person how he liked being held up to the 
town as the butt of satire. Jonson replied with an "Apolo- 
getical Dialogue " appended to his " Poetaster," and urged, as 
he had always urged, that his books were taught " to spare the 
persons, and to speak the vices." But, in fact, he generously 
yielded, and said : 

"Since the Comic Muse 
Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try 
If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. 
Her favors in my next I will pursue, 
Where, if I prove the pleasure hut of one, 
So he judicious be, he shall be alone 
A theatre unto me." 

" The Mermaid " was a tavern b} T Cheapside, between Bread 
Street and Frida} r Street, accessible from either ; and here Sir 
"Walter Raleigh is said to have established a club, at which 
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other wits 
of the time, met. The club founded by Raleigh is nrythical, but 
" The Mermaid " was a famous tavern, and that the wits of the 
time frequented it we have witness in Beaumont's lines to Jonson, 
which recall — 

" What things we have seen 

Done at 'The Mermaid ' ! Heard words that have been 

So nimble and so full of subtile flame, 

As if that every one from whom they came 

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 

And had resolved to live a fool the rest 

Of his dull life." 

Ben Jonson, under James I., gradually became the convivial 
centre of a group of men of genius, and owed his predominance 
to a real intellectual power. The playhouse audience w T as losing 
its old national character. Secession of those men who might 
have said ' ' Amen ' ' at the close of the ' ' Looking-glass for 
London and England ' ' meant the gradual loss of a main 
element in the audience, — that part of it on which a dramatist 
who is intensely earnest can rely for S3'mpathy. The shallow- 
ness of the king's character made his patronage of the stage 
no remedy for this. Fewer men came to the playhouse with 



To A.D. 1650.] BEN JONSON. 289 

their souls read}' to answer to the touch of genius. The range 
of Shakespeare's plots was wide as humanity, and in the true 
Elizabethan drama there is throughout variety of motive for 
the action of the dramas. But we have not gone far into the 
reign of James I. before we find this range becoming narrowed. 
The lower standard of the audiences for whom the plaj-wright 
worked limited the expression of his highest power. In the 
Elizabethan-Stuart drama the plots nearly all turn -upon animal 
love. Ben Jonson did not stoop to this. His plaj's had variety 
of theme, and through their wit and humor a vigorous mind 
was often uttering its wisdom to the deaf. He and his hearers 
were out of accord. He spoke of them and to them with an 
arrogant disdain, which the}' in part deserved ; and at last, after 
years of impatient service, while their degradation had been 
steadily proceeding, he turned from them with bitter words of 
loathing. Ben Jonson's self-assertion went too far ; but that 
which provoked it was a real change in the character of the 
dramatist's public. The growth of Puritanism outside the 
theatre withdrew, as has been said, an important element from 
the playnouse audience. Plays were then written to please the 
class of men who were left as patrons of the stage, and the 
change thus made in the plays would quicken the defection of 
the better sort of pla}*goers. But while Ben Jonson disdained 
the judgment of these later audiences, there was no disdainful 
spirit in his dealing with true men. He looked up to Shake- 
speare, and the fittest eulogy of Shakespeare's genius that an}' 
Englishman had written came from Ben Jonson. In his later 
life young men of genius gathered about him and looked up to 
him ; he called them heartily his sons, and had frank pride in 
their achievements. Of Shakespeare, it was Ben Jonson who 
sang : 

" How far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. 
And thongh thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek, 
From thence to honor thee I will not seek 
For names ; hut call forth thundering iEschylus, 
Euripides,. and Sophocles to us, 
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova, dead, 
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread, 



290 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

And shake a. stage ; or, when thy socks were on, 
Leave thee alone for the comparison 
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Eome 
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
Triumph, my Britain ! thou hast one to show, 
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. 
He was not of an age, but for all time ! 
And all the Muses still were in their prime, 
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm 
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm. 
Nature herself was proud of his designs, 
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines." 

Ben Jonson's tragedy of " Sejanus," produced in 1603, with 
work in it from another hand, was not very successful, but it 
succeeded better after he had recast it in part and made it all 
his own. It was printed in 1605 ; and the small criticisms of a 
pedantic age Ben Jonson forestalled with footnotes citing the 
authorit} T for all that lie had w r orked into an harmonious and 
very noble pky. Because the footnotes were there, and looked 
erudite, the superficial thing to do was to pronounce the play 
pedantic. But-it is not pedantic. Jonson was no pedant ; he 
had carried on for himself the education received at "Westmin- 
ster School, was a good scholar, delighted in his studies, and 
accumulated a good library, which, in the latter part of his life, 
was burnt. But he was true poet and true artist. His lyrics 
rank with the best of a time when nobody wrote dramas who 
was not poet enough to produce musical songs. No man can 
be a dramatist, in airy real sense of the word, who cannot 
produce good lyrics. The greater includes the less. As drama- 
tist, Jonson had not Shakespeare's wealth of fancy, his sense 
of kindred with all forms of life — one source of that more 
than insight into character, of that power of being in imagina- 
tion all that man can be, which caused his character-painting to 
stand quite alone in the world's literature. Nobody but Shake- 
speare ever made men speak as from within, and, one might sa} r , 
betra} T themselves, as men and women do in real life, so that 
in his mimic world the persons are as variously judged and tried 
b} T as many tests as if one were discussing words and deeds of 
living people. All other dramatists have painted men and 



To A.D. 1650.] BEN JONSON. 291 

women as the}' saw them and we see them, from without ; not 
reproducing life, but drawing pictures of it. 

Ben Jonson judged himself aright, and wrote only two 
tragedies. But each of them has a clear artistic structure, 
with dignity in its main thought, and vigorous dramatic scenes, 
from which, though it be tragedy-, the humor of the satirist is 
not entirely absent. Sejanus rises by base arts ; he spurns the 
gods, but has within his house a shrine to Fortune. He scorns 
the spiritual aims of life, works grossly for material success, 
and from his pinnacle of state falls to be dashed in pieces. 

" Let this example move the insolent man 
Not to grow proud and careless of the gods." 

There is a scene at the opening of the second Act in which 
EudemuSy the physician, is painting the cheeks of Li via. The 
dialogue blends meanest frivolity with a light planning of the 
most atrocious crime, and shows how Ben Jonson, following his 
own bent, could join a stern sense of the tragic in life with the 
humor of the comic poet. There is a very light touch of the 
spirit of comedy, suggesting the relation of small men to great 
events, in the fidget}' movements of Consul Regulus, who has 
been called out of his bed, in the third Scene of the fifth Act. 
In some character of a rough, honest censor, Ben Jonson him- 
self often walked abroad through his own plays. Thus, in 
"Sejanus," he ma}' be said to have embodied himself in the 
part of Arruntius. 

In these first years, also, of James's reign, there was so little 
of the ill-will of small minds following the stage controversy 
raised byMarston and Dekker in " Satiromastix," that Jonson 
and Dekker were working together, in 1603, at a masque for the 
city of London on his Majesty's accession ; and one of Marston's 
best plays — the " Malcontent," written probably in 1603, and 
certainly published in two editions in 1604 — was dedicated to 
Ben Jonson as his liberal and cordial friend. In 1605, when 
''Sejanus" was printed, Marston's friendship for Ben Jonson 
appeared in the front of it ; and in that year, also, Ben 
Jonson was fellow-worker with Marston and Chapman in the 
play of "Eastward Ho." The play contained a sentence — 
afterwards expunged — that offended the king, and brought the 



292 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

writers into trouble ; but its whole character of Sir Petronel 
Flash was a satire upon his Majesty's great cheapening of the 
honors of knighthood. The play itself, with some freedom of 
detail, was supremely moral in its design, being a contrast 
between the careers of the idle and the industrious apprentice. 
Ben Jonson, who had many friends among the abler men of 
rank at court, began at the outset of James's reign to find em- 
ployment as a writer of court masques. In this form of writ- 
ing — which had been untouched by Shakespeare — he was in 
his own da} T easily the first. But his true strength was in a 
form of comedy exclusively his own, broad and deep, generous 
in its aim, with scorn for all that is base, lively in its painting 
of a great variet} T of characters, each with some one predomi- 
nating feature which he called its humor, and strong throughout 
with a manly vigor of thought that gives a bracing sense of 
intellectual energy to every scene. The reader's mind, after a 
ramble through " Vol pone " or " The Alchemist," feels as his 
body might after a wholesome walk in the sea-breeze. Ben 
Jonson, about thirty years old at the accession of James I., 
was about thirty-two when, after " Sejanus," he produced 
" Volpone, or the Fox," in 1605; then followed two more of 
his masterpieces, u Epiccene, or the Silent Woman," in 1609, 
and u The Alchemist," in 1610. His other tragedy came 
next, " Catiline," in 1611. For twelve 3 r ears, during this earlier 
part of his life, Ben Jonson had been a Roman Catholic ; but 
he had hy this time rejoined the Church of England. In 1613 
he was in France as companion and tutor to Sir Walter Ra- 
leigh's son. When he came home he poured scorn upon the 
outside show of Puritanism, in his " Bartholomew Fair," and 
produced, in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, a comedy 
called " The Devil is an Ass," in which the imp Pug, having 
obtained a hoiida}* on earth, went back a lost fiend as to his 
character, for said Satan to him : 

''Whom hast thou dealt with, 
Woman or man, this day, but have outgone thee 
Some way, and most have proved the better fiends ?" 

Each part} T in the rising controversy of the day had its mean 
rout of camp-followers, serving the times for their own ad van- 



To A.D. 1650.] BEN JONSON. 293 

tage. If Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in " Bartholomew Fair " repre- 
sented one of the untruths of the time, the truth he parodied 
was in the good men of all parties. It was in Ben Jonson 
among the rest, and he uttered it in his own wa}- as a come- 
dian, very distinctly in this play, which followed next after 
"Bartholomew Fair." In the same year, 1G16, Ben Jonson 
published a folio as the first volume of his " Works," including 
not plays only, but epigrams and miscellaneous poems gathered 
under the title of " The Forest." In this year Jonson ceased 
to write for the playhouse. He continued to produce court 
masques, but wrote no more plays for the public stage until 
after the death of James I. The degree of M.A. was con- 
ferred on him in 1619 by the University of Oxford ; and, at 
the cost of some trouble, Ben Jonson escaped being knighted 
by King James. 

After the death of James I. in 1625, Ben Jonson was driven 
to the stage again by povert}\ The town did not receive his 
play, "The Staple of News," produced in 1625, with much 
favor ; and at the close of that } T ear the poet had a stroke of 
pals}'. He had bad health during the rest of his life. His 
\i\ny of " The New Inn," acted in January, 1630, was driven 
from the stage ; and it was then that Jonson turned upon the 
pla\~house audiences with an indignant ode. At the end of 
1631 a quarrel with our first great architect of the Renais- 
sance, Inigo Jones, who invented the machinery for the court 
masques, deprived Jonson of all court patronage ; and in 1632 
and 1633 he was compelled to write feebly for the public stage 
his last plays, "The Magnetic Lady" and " The Tale of a 
Tub." But after this, court favor and city favor, which also 
had been withdrawn, were regained for him. He had a pension 
from court of a hundred pounds and a tierce of canary. The 
favor of all the good poets of the time was with him always. 
In the latter part of James's reign Jonson had lodged at a 
comb-maker's, outside Temple Bar. Just within Temple Bar, 
and between it and the Middle Temple gate, was a tavern, 
which had for its sign Dunstan, the saint of the parish, with 
the devil's nose in his tongs. It was called, therefore, the 
" Devil Tavern." Here Ben Jonson gathered about him the 



294 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

new generation of poets, in the Apollo Club. In his last days, 
when disease was closing in upon him, lie was all poet again, at 
work on his pastoral play of " The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale 
of Robin Hood," which he left unfinished. He died in August, 
1637, and was buried in Westminster Abbe}'. There was ques- 
tion of a monument, but none was raised. One Jack Young 
gave a mason eighteen-pence to cut on the stone over the grave 
" rare Ben Jonson." 

4. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, whose plays 
belong entirely to the reign of James I., first appeared together 
as friends of Ben Jonson. each of them furnishing verses pre- 
fixed to the first publication of " Volpone." in 1607. John 
Fletcher, the elder of the two friends, was born at Rye, in 
1576, when his father — ten years afterwards a bishop — was 
vicar there. He was educated at home and at Benet College, 
Cambridge : afterwards came to London, and began his career 
as a dramatist, at the age of about twenty-seven, with ' ; The 
Woman Hater " and " Thierry and Theodovet," both perhaps 
written before he entered into literary partnership with Beau- 
mont. 

Francis Beaumont was about ten years younger than Fletcher. 
He was the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont, Justice of the 
Common Pleas ; was born probably in 1586 ; admitted in his 
thirteenth year a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates Hall (now 
Pembroke College) , Oxford ; left the university without a de- 
gree ; and at the age of about seventeen was entered of the Inner 
Temple. In 1602 he published a paraphrase of Ovid's tale 
of u Salmacis and Hermaphroditus ; " and in 1607. when he was 
twenty-one and Fletcher thirty-one, he wrote his lines in 
praise of Ben Jonson's " Volpone." Thenceforth, until the 
year of Shakespeare's death, Beaumont and Fletcher, close 
friends, worked together for the players. Beaumont had pri- 
vate means, and married. Fletcher depended on his earnings. 
Beaumont died a few weeks before Shakespeare, in March, 
1616 ; all plays, therefore, that are the joint work of Beaumont 
and Fletcher, were produced during the ten years between 1606 
and 1616. John Fletcher was not only ten years older than 
Beaumont, but he survived him nine years, and was sole author 






To A. D. 1650. 1 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 295 

of many of the plan's known as Beaumont and Fletcher's. 
Bean nt, as dramatist, wrote probably no work that was all 
his own, except in 1613 a masque on the marriage of the Princess 
Elizabeth. Fletcher wrote a play or two of his own before the 
partnership began ; probably four plaj-s wholly his own were 
produced during the partnership ; and he continued to write 
during the nine or ten years between Beaumont's death, in 
March, 1616, and his own death by the plague, in August, 1625. 
Omitting a few doubtful works, about forty plays were written 
entirely by John Fletcher, and thirteen were probably the joint 
work of the partners. These were " Philaster," " The Maid's 
Tragedy," "A King and no King," "The Knight of the Burn- 
ing Pestle," "Cupid's Revenge," "The Coxcomb," "Four 
Plays in One," " The Scornful Lady," "The Honest Man's For- 
tune," " The Little French Lawyer," " Wit at Several Weap- 
ons," "A Right Woman," and "The Laws of Candy." In 
verses " On Mr. Beaumont, written presently after his death," 
03- his friend John Earle, then a 3~oung man, credit is given to 
Beaumont for the first three pla3*s named in this list. Francis 
Beaumont and Ben Jonson were heart3 r friends. The elder 
poet wrote of the younger : 

"How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse, 
That unto me dost such religion use! 
How I do fear myself, that am not worth 
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth I" 

Tradition, dating from their own time, gave preeminence to 
Fletcher for luxuriance of fanc3^ and invention, and to Beau- 
mont for critical judgment, to which it was said that even Ben 
Jonson submitted his writings. The wit and poetiy of these 
pkrys were spent chiefly on themes of love. Their authors, 
capable of higher flights, so far accommodated their good work 
to the lower tone of the pla3'house as to earn praise for having 
"understood and imitated much better than Shakespeare the 
conversation of gentlemen whose wild debaucheries and quick- 
ness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as the3' have 
done. Humor, which Ben Jonson derived from particular per- 
sons, the3 T made it not their business to describe ; the3 T rep- 
resented all the passions veiy lively." So Beaumont and 



296 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

Fletcher were praised by Diyden in the time of Charles II., 
when their pla} T s were "'the most pleasant and frequent enter- 
tainments of the stage, two of theirs being acted through the 
year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." We shall see 
how in that later Stuart time "The Maid's Tragedy" was 
dealt with. As first produced, in 1609, it ended tragically for 
a king of Rhodes, and its last words were : 

" On lustful kings 
Unlook'd-for sudden deaths from Heav'n are sent; 
But curst is he that is their instrument." 

Here was the good Elizabethan sense of common right and 
duty, guarded by a line in recognition of the sacredness of 
royal persons. "The Faithful Shepherdess," by Fletcher 
alone, produced early in 1610, was above the playhouse stand- 
ard of taste and morality, being a pastoral play in praise of 
maiden innocence, dantily versified and most pure in its design, 
although its moral is sometimes enforced by scenes which, as 
men now judge, depict too freely the evil they condemn. That 
is a question only of change in conventional opinion ; the true 
mind of the play is absolutely pure. 

"The Kniglit of the Burning Pestle," by Beaumont and 
Fletcher, was a lively burlesque on the taste for high-flown 
romances, which Cervantes had attacked only six 3-ears before 
in his "Don Quixote." A citizen, speaking from among the 
audience, stops the actors at their prologue, says there shall be 
a grocer in the play, and he shall do admirable things. The 
citizen's wife says he shall kill a lion with a pestle ; and their 
man, Ralph, is the man to do it. Ralph, being thus forced on 
the players, burlesques the taste for Palmerin of England ; ap- 
pears, with squire and dwarf, as a knight, who swears b} T his 
ancestor Amadis of Gaul ; has an inn described to him b} T his 
squire as an ancient castle held by the old knight of the most 
holy order of "The Bell," who has three squires, Chamber- 
lino, Tapstero, and Ostlero ; and when the tapster answers a 
lance-knock at the door, addresses him in this fashion : 

" Fair Squire Tapstero, I, a wandering knight, 
Higlit of the Burning Pestle, in the quest 
Of this fair lady's casket and wrought purse, 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN MARSTON. 297 

Losing myself in this vast wilderness, 

Am to this castle well by fortune brought; 

Where hearing of the goodly entertain 

Your knight of holy order of ' The Bell ' 

Gives to all damsels and all errant knights, 

I thought to knock, and now am bold to enter." 

This earliest burlesque in our dramatic literature was evidently fol- 
lowing the lead of " Don Quixote." It was in 1605, at a time corre- 
sponding to the second year of the reign of James I. in England, that 
Cervantes published the first part of his "Don Quixote;" the second 
part, still better than the first, was published in 1615. Beaumont and 
Fletcher's burlesque on the affected forms into which tales of chivalry 
had degenerated appeared in 1611. 

5. Of most of Shakespeare's contemporaries and immediate successors 
in the drama, we can give here but slight mention. George Chapman 
will be spoken of in connection with the translators. 

Thomas Heywood, one of the busiest and most prolific of this 
wonderful group of playwrights, was a native of Lincolnshire, and a 
Fellow of Feterhouse, Cambridge. He joined the players, and was a 
young man when writing for them in 1596. In 1598 he produced "War 
without Blows and Love without Suit," and immediately afterwards 
"Joan as good as my Lady." He probably lived until about 1648, and 
according to his own account had "either an entire hand, or at the least 
a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays. 

6. Thomas Middleton was born in London about 1570, and died in 
1627. He was admitted of Gray's Inn in 1593. Among his writings are 
"Randall Earl of Chester;" "Blurt, Master-Constable, or the Span- 
iard's Night-Walk; " " Two Harpies; " and " Mycrocynicon, six snarling 
Satires." 

7. Thomas Dekker, who was also born about 1570, began to write in 
the days of the later Elizabethan drama. His " Phaeton " was acted in 
1597; other plays rapidly followed. His comedies of "Old Fortunatus" 
and the "Shoemaker's Holiday" were printed in 1600, and his "Satiro- 
mastix" in 1602. He continued to be an active dramatist and pam- 
phleteer throughout his long life, dying not earlier than 1637. 

8. John Marston, who was probably educated at Oxford, began in 
1598 as a satirist with " The Scourge of Villainie, three Books of Satires," 
and "The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, and certaine Satyres," 
one of the books burnt by Whitgift and Bancroft when they forbade the 
writing of more satire. Marston wrote a tragedy, " Antonio and Mel- 
lida," which had a sequel, "Antonio's Revenge," and these plays were 
both printed in 1602. Other plays of his are " The Insatiate Countess," 
1603; "The Wonder of Women, or Sophonisba," 1606; "The Malcon- 
tent," 1604; " Parasitaster, or The Fawn," 1606; "What You Will," 
1607 ; and " Eastward Ho," 1605. He died in 1634. 



298 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

9. During the best years of Shakespeare's life as a dramatist, 'Wil- 
liam Alexander, of Menstrie, afterwards Sir William Alexander and 
first Earl of Stirling, wrote four weak plays, — "Darius," first printed 
in 1603; " Croesus," in 1604;." The Alexandrian, Tragedy," in 1605, and 
"Julius Caesar," in 1607, when the series was published together as 
"The Monarchic Tragedies." William Alexander was then a Gentleman 
of the Chamber to Prince Henry, and a Scotchman in much favor with 
King James. 

10. Cyril Tourneur, a dramatic poet with real tragic power, of 
whose life little is known, and whose extant plays are " The Revenger's 
Tragedy," " The Atheist's Tragedy," and " The Nobleman," wrote only 
in the reign of James I. 

11. William Rowley, who during the last three years of Shake- 
speare's life was at the head of the Prince of Wales's company of 
comedians, wrote, or took part in writing, many plays, chiefly comedies, 
during the reign of James I. He published also, in 1609, a lively picture 
of London life, called "A Search for Money; or, the Lamentable Com- 
plaint for the Loss of the Wandering Knight, Monsieur 1' Argent." 

12. Nathaniel Field was one of the Children of the Revels who, in 
1601, played in Ben Jonson's " Poetaster." He became known as a very 
good actor in the Blackfriars Company, also as a dramatist. Before 1011 
he wrote two plays of his own, "Woman is a Weathercock," and a 
second part, called "Amends for Ladies." He lived until about 1641. 

13. John Webster and Philip Massinger, true poets both, and drama- 
tists of higher mark than those just named, were nearly of like age. 
Philip Massinger was born at Salisbury, in 1584. His father was in 
the household of Henry, Earl of Pembroke. In the last year of Queen 
Elizabeth's reign, Massinger became a commoner of St. Albans Hall, 
Oxford; but the death of his father, in 1606, obliged him to leave the 
university and support himself as he could. Many of his plays are lost, 
and there is slight record of work of his earlier than 1622, when "The 
Virgin Martyr" was printed. "The Duke of Milan" was printed in 
1623. In December, 1623, Massinger' s name first appeared in the office- 
book of the Master of the Revels, when his "Bondman" was acted. 
That play was first printed in 1624. Twelve of Massinger's plays were 
printed in his lifetime, but only these three in the reign of James I. 
Massinger lived until 1640, writing many plays, of which only eighteen 
remain. The public stage under Charles I. was not strongly supported 
by the king and court, and it was strongly contemned by the Puritans. 
Good plays were often ill received, and then good poets might hunger. 
In 1633, when Ben Jouson made his last struggle to please a playhouse 
audience, Massinger printed that one of his plays which has held the 
stage to our own time, " A New Way to Pay Old Debts." 

John Webster, a master poet in the suggestion of tragic horror, 
produced in the reign of James I. two of his finest plays, — " The White 
Devil; or, Vittoria Corombona," printed in 1612; and "The Duchess 



ToA.D. 1650.] THOMAS MAY. 299 

of Malfi," first acted about the time of Shakespeare's death, but printed 
in 1623. Webster also wrote in the reign of Charles I. He lived on into 
the time of the Commonwealth, and died about 1654. 

14. John Ford, born in 1586, at llsington, in Devonshire, and bred 
to the law, began to write plays only two or three years before the acces- 
sion of Charles I., and was one of the chief dramatists of Charles's reign, 
until his death about 1639. In Ford, as in Massinger, men born in 
Elizabeth's reign, with grandeur of poetical conception, there is still 
the ring of Elizabethan poetry. 

There is enough of it also in James Shirley, who was only seven 
years old when Elizabeth died, and who lived into Charles II. 's reign, 
to justify his place among Elizabethan-Stuart dramatists. The reign 
of Charles I. was Shirley's work-time as a dramatist. He was a Lon- 
doner born, educated at Merchant-Tailors' School, and at St. John's 
College, Oxford, when Laud was its president. He removed to Cam- 
bridge, took orders, had a cure near St. Albans, left that because he 
turned Romanist, and taught, in 1623, at the St. Albans Grammar 
School. Then Shirley came to London, became a dramatist, and was 
not unprosperous ; his genius and his Catholicism recommended him to 
Charles's queen. He went to Ireland in 1637, the year of Ben Jonson's 
death, and wrote plays for a theatre then newly built, the first in Dublin. 
When he came back, a clever dramatist, and blameless gentleman, James 
Shirley took part on the king's side in the Civil War; and when the 
stage would no longer support his wife and family he taught boys 
again. 

In the versification of many Elizabethan-Stuart dramatists, and 
noticeably in Massinger and Shirley, there is further development of 
the ten-syllabled blank-verse into a free measure, with frequent use of 
additional syllables, often monosyllables. The breaks of lines also are 
often so made as to compel such running of two lines together as 
deprives the verse of some of its character. We have begun the descent 
from poetical blank-verse to a loosely metrical form of dialogue, when 
we find writing like this in Massinger: 

•'Speak thy griefs. 

I shah, sir; 
But in a perplexed form and method, which 
You only can interpret : would you had not 
A guilty knowledge in your hosom of 
The language which you force me to deliver." 

15. Thomas May, born in Sussex, in 1594 or 1595, came from Cam- 
bridge to Gray's Inn, and was the one among Elizabethan-Stuart dram- 
atists whose work was least Elizabethan. His comedy of "The Heir" 
was printed in 1622, when he also published a translation of Yirgil's 
"Georgics." In 1627 appeared his translation of Lucan's "Pharsalia," 
which had been preceded, in 1614, by that of Sir Arthur Gorges. In 
1633, May added, in seven books, his own "Continuation," down to the 



300 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

death of Julius Caesar. May's "Lucan" caused Charles I. to command 
of him two original historical poems. These were, " The Reigne of King 
Henry the Second, in Seven Bookes" (1633), and, also in seven books, 
'•The Victorious Reigne of King Edward the Third" (1635). In the 
Civil War, May took part with the Parliament, and was made its secre- 
tary and historiographer. In this character he published, in 1647, in 
folio, "The History of the Parliament of England which began Nov. 3, 
M.DO.XL. ; with a Short and Necessary View of some Precedent Years : " 
an abridgment of this, in three parts, appeared in 1650, the year of his 
death. May also translated a selection from Martial's "Epigrams" and 
Barclay's "Argenis" and "Icon Animarum." 

16. Stuart dramatists born within a year or two after the death of 
Elizabeth were Jasper Mayne, Thomas Randolph, and William Dave- 
nant. Jasper Mayne, born in 1604, at Hatherleigh, Devonshire, was 
educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. He held 
the livings of Cassington and Pyrton, in Oxfordshire, till he was deprived 
of them in 1648. He wrote in the time of Charles I. a comedy called 
"The City Match," printed in 1639, and the tragi-comedy of "The 
Amorous War," printed in 1648. After the Restoration he became 
Archdeacon of Chichester and chaplain to Charles II. He lived till 
1672. 

17. Thomas Randolph, born at ISTewnham, Northamptonshire, in 
1605, was at Westminster School with Mayne. He went to Trinity 
College, Cambridge, became M.A. and Fellow of his College, was a good 
scholar and good wit, lived gayly, and died in 1634, before he was thirty. 
In honor of sack and contempt of beer, he wrote a lively dramatic show, 
called " Aristippus " (1630), in which the jovial philosopher — whose 
name was given to sack (sec) or dry sherry — lectured to scholars on the 
virtues of that source of inspiration, till the scholars sang: 

" Your ale is too muddy, good sack is our study, 
Our tutor is Aristippus." 

Yet in another of Randolph's plays, "The Muses' Looking-Glass," 
there is a moralizing of the uses of the drama for the benefit of Puritan 
objectors; and after a dance of the seven sins, the opposite extremes 
which have a virtue in the mean — as servile Flattery and peevish Imper- 
tinence, extremes on either side of Courtesy; impious Confidence and 
overmuch Fear, extremes of Fortitude ; swift Quarrelsomeness and the 
Insensibility to Wrong, extremes of Meekness — are cleverly illustrated 
in successive dialogues. The Golden Mean appears early in the play, 
with a masque of Virtues, replying to the Puritans who said that the 
stage lived by vice : 

"Indeed, 'tis true, 
As the physicians by diseases do, 
Only to cure them." 

Thomas Randolph wrote also a comedy, " The Jealous Lovers," acted, 



To A. D. 1650.] WILLIAM DAVENANT. 301 

in 1632, before Charles and his queen by the students of Trinity College ; 
and a graceful pastoral play, "Amyntas," acted before the king and 
queen at Whitehall, and first printed in 1638. Among Kandolph's songs 
and poems is one to Ben Jonson, who loved him and other of the bright 
young poets of the day, and called them sons. I was not born, he says, 
to Helicon ; 

" But thy adoption quits me of all fear, 
And makes me challenge a child's portion there. 
I am akin to heroes, being thine, 
And part of my alliance is divine." 

18. Sir "William Davenant, who was born in 1606, and died in 1668, 
and who personally knew both Shakespeare and Dryden, may be regarded 
as the connecting link between the Elizabethan dramatists and the 
dramatists of the Restoration. He began to write plays in his youth, 
and he continued to write them in his old age. He will be more particu- 
larly dealt with under the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century. 



CHAPTER V. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 
POETRY CHIEFLY NON-DRAMATIC. 

1. Samuel Daniel. — 2. Hichael Drayton. — 3. William Premie. — 4. Giles Fletcher: 

Phineas Fletcher. — o. George Wither. — 6. William Prummoii-l. — 7. Eater 
Euphuism in Poetry. — '*. John l l :.:.-.-.— £'. Thoma* toryat: John Taylor.— 
10. — Fraud- Quarles. — 11. Georse Herbert. — 12. Ekhanl Cra*haw. — 13. 
Character Poetry: Orerbury : HaMntrton : Earle. — 14. The Translator*: 
George Chapman ; George Sandys: Bart en Holylay. — 15. Wit*. Satirist*, ar.'l 
Song-Wri -ph Hall. — 10. <ir John Harinsrton. — 17. I 

— IS. John Cleveland.— 19. Thoma* Carew. — 20. vi John P: ■:.]...-..;. — -:i. vr 
John Sb« kling. — 22. William lart^ii-'lit. — -3. Bichard Lovelace.— 24. Pol" 
ert Herrick.— 2b. The Position or John Xilton in Literature; Hi* Earlier 
Poetry. 

1. Samuel Daniel was born near Taunton, in 1562. the 
son of a music-master. From 1571 to la 32 he ws 3 tidying as 
a commoner at Magdalene Hall, Oxford, but he did not take a 
degree. In 1585, at the age of twenty-three, he translated 
from the Italian " The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovins, con-- 
tayning a Discourse of rare Inventions, both Militarie and 
Amorous, called Impresse. TThereunto is added a Pre 
contayning the Arte of Composing them, with many other 
Notable Devises."' Daniel 1 :ame tutor to the Lady A 
Clifford, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, and became histo- 
rian and poet under the patronage of the Earl of Peml . 
family. He began his career as an original poet, strongly inilu- 
enced by the Italian writers, in 1592, with •• Delia: contayning 
certayne Sonnets, with the Complaint of Rosamond." This he 
dedicated to Mary. Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's -ister; 
augmented editions, bringing the number of sonnets to fifty- 
seven, followed in 1594 and 1595. In 1595, Daniel combined 
his functions of historian and poet by publishing 4 ' The First 
Fowre Books of the Civille Wanes betweene the Two Hose - 
of Lancaster and Yorke." This poem is in s: a : n the 



A.D. 1600.] MICHAEL DRAYTON. 303 

octave rhyme, established by Boccaccio as the Italian measure 
for narrative poetry, used by Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso. 
Strongly influenced by Italian forms, and often paraphrasing 
and translating from Italian, Daniel took naturally to octave 
rhyme for his poem on the civil wars. It was, like Sackville's 
tragedy of Buckingham, in the "Mirror for Magistrates," too 
much of a history to be a poem in the true artistic sense ; but it 
was musical in versification, patriotic and religious, and some- 
what diffuse in moralizing, with so much of the conservative 
tone, that, in church matters, some thought Daniel inclined 
towards Catholicism. In 1597 appeared his " Tragedy of Phi- 
lotas ; " in 1599, " Musophilus," and other " Poetical Essayes." 
The poem on the civil wars was also extended to five books 
in 1599; a sixth book followed in 1602. Daniel's "Musophi- 
lus" was a general defence of learning in dialogue between 
Philocosmus, a lover of the world, and Musophilus, a lover of 
the Muses. It has been said that after the death of Spenser, 
in 1599, Daniel succeeded him as poet-laureate. But there was 
in Elizabeth's time no recognized court office of poet-laureate. 
He wrote in prose a " Collection of the History of England," 
first published in 1613 and 1618. It begins with Roman Britain, 
and ends with the reign of Edward III. 

2. Michael Drayton, born at Hartshill, Warwickshire, was 
of about the same age as Daniel, but a poet with more sensi- 
bility, more vigor and grace of thought. Like Daniel, he began 
to write after 1590, and became a busy poet. He is said to 
have been maintained for a time at Oxford by Sir Henry 
Goodere, cf Polsworth, and he had a friend and patron in Sir 
Walter Aston, of Tixhall, in Staffordshire. In 1591, Drayton 
began his career as poet with a sacred strain: "The Harmony 
of the Church, containing the Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns 
of Godly Men, Patriarchs, and Prophets, all sweetly sounding 
to the Glory of the Highest." This was followed, in 1593, 
b}' "Idea; the Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in Nine Ec- 
logues ; " " Rowland's Sacrifice to the Nine Muses ; " in 1594, 
by his "Matilda," and his "Idea's Mirror, Amours in Qua- 
torzains." In 1596, " Matilda " re-appeared in a volume which 
showed Drayton's Muse to be then running parallel with Dan- 



304 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

iel's in choice of subject, and to be passing from love pastorals 
and sonnets to a strain from the past histoiy of England. A 
year after Daniel's " Civil Wars " appeared Dillon's " Tragi- 
cal Legend of Robert Duke of Normandy, with the Legend 
of Matilda the Chaste, Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitz- 
water, poysoned by King John ; and the Legend of Piers 
Gaveston, the latter two b} T him newly corrected and aug- 
mented ; " and in the same jxar, 1596, — j^ear of the second 
part of "The Faery Queen," and of Spenser's last publica- 
tions, — appeared Draj'ton's i l Mortimeriados : the Lamenta- 
ble Civell Warres of Edward the Second and the Barrons," 
a poem afterwards known as the "Barons' Wars." It was in 
stanzas of octave rhyme, like that poem on the civil wars of 
Lancaster and York which Daniel had published in part, and 
was still at work upon. The poets chose these themes because 
they yielded much reverse of fortune that could point a moral 
in the spirit illustrated by the still popular " Mirror for Magis- 
trates." In 1598 Drayton again made poetry of history by 
publishing — their idea taken from Ovid — " England's Heroi- 
cal Epistles;" letters from Rosamond to Henry II. and 
from Hemy II. to Rosamond, with like pairs of letters between 
King John and Matilda, Mortimer and Queen Isabel, and so 
forth. At the accession of James I., Drayton wrote "To the 
Majestie of King James; a Gratulatore Poem," but turned 
from the king disappointed; published, in 1604, his fable of 
" The Owle ; " and in 1607 the " Legend of Great Cromwell," 
which appeared again in 1609 as " The Historie of the Life and 
Death of the Lord Cromwell, some time Earl of Essex and Lord 
Chancellor of England." In 1613 appeared his " Polyolbion " 
(the word means Many-ways-Happy) , a poetical description of 
his native land, in nearly sixteen thousand lines of Alexandrine 
verse, with maps of counties, and antiquarian notes by the 
author's friend, John Selden. This poem was another illus- 
tration of the quickened patriotism of the English. Thus Dra}*- 
ton sang when he came to his own county of Warwick, that he 
and Shakespeare loved : 

"My native country, then, which so brave spirits hast bred, 
If there be virtues yet remaining in thy earth, 



A.D. 1650. | GILES FLETCHER. 305 

Or any good of thine thou bredst into my birth, 
\ccept it as thine own, whilst now 1 sing of thee, 
Of all the later brood the un worthiest though I be." 

3. "William Browne, born in 1590, at Tavistock, in Devonshire, 
studied at Exeter College, Oxford, then went to the Inner Temple, and 
in 1613, the year of the appearance of Drayton's " Polyolbion," pro- 
duced, at the age of twenty-three, the first part of his " Britannia's 
Pastorals," partly written before he was twenty. "The Shepherd's 
Pipe," in seven eclogues, followed in 1614. In 1616, the year of Shake- 
speare's death, appeared the second part of Browne's " Britannia's Pas- 
torals." The two parts were published together about the end of 
James's reign, and about the same time their author went back to 
Exeter College as tutor to Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon. His 
pleasant pastoral strain touched but lightly upon the realities of life. 
The rustic manner showed the influence of Spenser, but in James's 
reign this influence was greatest on Giles Fletcher. 

4. Giles Fletcher, who was brother to Phineas Fletcher, 
the poet, and cousin to John Fletcher, the dramatist, was at 
Trinity College, Cambridge, when he contributed a canto to the 
collection of verses, " Sorrow's Jo}'," on the death of Elizabeth 
and accession of James, published by the printer to the uni- 
versity in 1603. He took the degree of B.D. at Trinity College, 
and held the living of Alderton, in Suffolk, till his death, in 
1623. It was not until after the death of Giles that his elder 
brother, Phineas, appeared in print as a poet ; though in one 
of his poems Giles spoke of his brother as young Thyrsilis, 
the Kentish lad that lately taught 

" His oaten reed the trumpet's silver sound." 

Giles Fletcher published at Cambridge, in 1610, when he was 
about six and twent}', a devout poem on " Christ's Victory and 
Triumph over and after Death," in an original eight-lined 
stanza, suggested by Spenser's, but not happily constructed. 
For five lines the stanza followed Spenser, and then came a 
triplet, of which the last line was an Alexandrine - , as in the 
Spenserian stanza. Thus : 

" At length an aged sire far off he saw 

Come slowly footing; every step he guess' d 

One of his feet he from the grave did draw; 
Three legs he had, that made of wood was best; 

And all the way he went he ever blest 



306 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

With benedictions, and with prayers store; 
But the bad ground was blessed ne'er the more: 
And all his head with snow of age was waxen hoar." 

" Christ's Victory in Heaven" heralded the work of Christ with 
long personifications and speeches of Justice and of Mercy, to 
whom finally all bowed ; the ' ; Victory on Earth ' ' painted Christ 
in the wilderness, approached by Satan (the aged sire above 
mentioned) in the guise of an old Palmer, who so bowed " that 
at his feet his head he seemed to throw," who led Christ to 
the cave of Despair, which he would entice him to enter ; to 
the top of the Temple, also, where personified Presumption 
tempted in vain ; and then to Pangloretta, on the mountain-top, 
where Giles Fletcher faintly recalled notes from Spenser's bower 
of Acrasia. The other two books on the " Triumph over 
Death " and the " Triumph after Death " were in like manner. 

Phineas Fletcher, who had the living of Hilgay, in Nor- 
folk, was born at Cranbrook, Kent, in April, 1582, and went 
to Cambridge from Eton in 1G00. He published in 1627 a satire 
against the Jesuits, " The Locustes, or Apollyonists," in Latin 
and English; in 1631, " Sicelides," in five Acts, as it hath 
been acted in King's College, in Cambridge ; in 1632, a couple 
of religious pieces; in 1633, Latin poems, " Sylva Poetica " 
and " The Purple Island." Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Is- 
land " is the " Isle of Man," and the poem is a long allegory 
in ten cantos of the study of man, with an allegorical descrip- 
tion of his structure ; much larger and less poetical than Spen- 
ser's in "The Faery Queen;" with allegorical description of 
the passions, desires, virtues lodged in man, as " this Purple 
Island's nation; " and, of course, not wanting the dragon to 
be fiercely contended with. The poem was written long before 
it was published ; for its flight is said to be that of a " callow 
wing that's new!}' left the nest," and it represents a young 
man's reverence for Spenser. Quarles called its author " the 
Spenser of this age." The metre of " The Purple Island" is 
Giles Fletcher's eight-lined stanza, with its fifth line gone. 

5. George Wither was born in 1588, at Bentworth. near 
Alton, in Hampshire. At the beginning of the reign of James 
I. he was sent to Oxford, but was soon recalled to attend to the 






To A.D. 1650.] GEORGE WITHER. 307 

Hampshire farm land. In 1612, Wither first appeared as a poet 
by joining in the lament for Prince He my, adding to his ele- 
gies a "supposed interlocution between the ghost of Prince 
Henry and Great Britaine ; " and in 1613, being then twemy- 
five }^ears old, he spoke out boldly for England in " Abuses 
Stript and Whipt ; or, Satirical Essayes, by George Wyther, 
divided into Two Bookes." The successive satires are under 
the heads of human passions, as Love, Lust, Hate, Envy, Re- 
venge, and so forth : 

" What ? you would fain have all the great ones freed, 
They must not for their vices he controll'd; 
Beware; that were a sauciness indeed; 
But if the great ones to offend he bold, 
I see no reason but they should be told." 

Wither was bold in condemnation, as others in offence. While 
he continued the attack upon self-seeking of the higher clergy, 
he maintained the office of the bishop, and gave high praise 
to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London. The 
satires, although sharp, were generous ; their style was diffuse, 
but simple, earnest, often vigorous, for Wither had the true 
mind of a poet. He would tell what he knew : 

" And then if any frown (as sure they dare not) 
So I speak truth, let them frown still, I care not." 

The great ones did frown, and Wither was locked up in the 
Marshalsea. But he was not to be silenced. He sang on in 
his cage, and sang plain English, contemning the pedantry of 
fashion. Wither translated in his prison a Greek poem on 
" The Nature of Man ; " besides writing the most maul}- pas- 
torals produced in James's reign, "The Shepherd's Hunting; 
being certain Eclogues written during the time of the Author's 
Imprisonment in the Marshalsey ; " and a " Satire to the King," 
in justification of his former satires. In "The Shepherd's 
Hunting," we learn how Wither, as Philarete (lover of Virtue), 
had hunted with ten couple of dogs (the satires in "Abuses 
Stript and Whipt") those foxes, wolves, and beasts of prey 
that spoil our folds and bear our lambs away. But wounded 
wolves and foxes put on sheep's clothing, complained of the 
shepherd's hunting, and caused his imprisonment. In his 



308 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. i5oo 

prison, Philarete talked with his friends, kept up his spirit, and 
was comforted by song. " Wither' s Motto: Nee Habeo, Nee 
Careo, Nee Curo," was published in 1618. In 1622 Wither' s 
poems were collected as "Juvenilia; " and in the same year 
he published " Faire -Virtue, the Mistresse of Philarete, written 
hy Him-selfe." Virtue is here described as a perfect woman, 
mistress of Philarete. This long poem, in seven-sjilabled 
verse, is musical with interspersed songs, including the famous 

couplet : 

" Shall I, wasting in despair, 
Die because a woman's fair ?" 

and delicately playful with the purest sense of grace and beauty. 
George Wither takes his own way still, saying : 

" Pedants shall not tie my strains 
To our antique poets' veins, 
As if we in latter days 
Knew to love, but not to praise. 
Being born as free as these, 
I will sing as I shall please, 
Who as well new paths may run 
As the best before have done."' 

At the beginning of the reign of Charles, he was in London 
during a great plague time, bravely helping its victims, and he 
published, in 1628, a poem upon his experiences, as "Britain's 
Remembrancer : containing a Narration of the Plague lately 
Past ; a Declaration of the Mischiefs Present, and a Prediction 
of Judgments to Come (if Repentance Prevent not). It is 
Dedicated (for the Glory of God) to Posteritie ; and to these 
Times (if the} r please), by Geo. Wither." Wither tells the 
reader of this book : " I was faine to print every sheet thereof 
with my owne hand, because I could not get allowance to doe 
it publikely." His verse translation of "The Psalms" was 
printed in the Netherlands, in 1632; his "Emblems," with 
metrical illustrations, in 1635; his "Hallelujah; or, Britain's 
Second Remembrancer," in 1641. Wither, of course, was 
active in the civil war, body and mind, becoming captain and 
major in the army of the Parliament. When his " Emblems " 
appeared he was the king's friend. He was the king's friend 
even when opposing him in the first incidents of civil war, as 



To A.D. 1650.] LATER EUPHUISM. 309 

one who hoped for reconciliation between king and parliament. 
Wither lived on, and was an old man in London at the time of 
the great fire. He died in 1667. 

6. "William Drummond, of Edinburgh, after four years in France, 
inherited, in 1610, at the age of twenty-five, his paternal estate of 
Hawthornden, gave up the study of law, took his ease, and wrote 
poetry. He joined in the lament for the death of Henry, Prince of 
Wales; published at Edinburgh, in 1616, "Poems: Amorous, Funerall, 
Divine, Pastorall, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, by W. D., 
the Author of the Teares on the Death of Moeliades" (Moeliades was the 
anagram made for himself by the prince from "Miles a Deo"); and in 
1617, upon James's visit to Scotland, published "Forth Feasting: a 
Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent Majestic" During the greater 
part of April, 1619, Drummond had Ben Jonson for a guest, and took 
ungenial notes of his conversation. In 1623 he published "Flowres of 
Sion, to which is adjoyned his Cypresse Grove." His sonnets were true 
to the old form of that kind of poem, and they were not all of earthly 
love and beauty ; for sonnets in the spirit of Spenser's Hymns of Heavenly 
Love and Beauty are among the spiritual poems in Drummond of Haw- 
thornden' s " Flowers of Sion." He lived through the reign of Charles I., 
and died soon after the king's execution, in 1649. There has been as- 
cribed to him a mock-heroic macaronic poem on a country quarrel over 
muck-carts — " Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et 'Nebernam " — blend- 
ing Latin with the Scottish dialect in a coarse but comical example of 
that kind of writing. 

7. Strain for ingenious alliteration, and for unexpected turns 
of phrase or thought, losing much of the grace and strength it 
had in the Elizabethan time, became more pedantic in the wise, 
more frivolous in the foolish, often obscure by the excess of 
artifice and the defect of sense. There was the same degenera- 
tion eveiywhere of the Earlier Euphuism, bright with fresh 
invention and poetical conceits, into the Later Euphuism that 
had to a great extent lost freshness of impulse, and was made 
obscure b} T poets, who, with less to say than their predecessors, 
labored to outdo them in ingenuities of thought and speech. 
There is no reason in or out of metaphysics why the Later 
Euphuistic poetiy, of which Donne's verse is a type, should be 
called " metaplrysical." It was so called in an age that knew 
little or nothing of the character of English poetry before the 
Commonwealth. There is as little reason for the assertion that 
a change for the worse was made in our literature by the influ- 



310 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

enee of Donne. He only represented change, and he was 
popular because he followed cleverly the fashion of his day. 
Precisely what has been said of Donne, in his relation to our 
English literature, has been said also of Gongora, who died in 
1627, and of Marini, who died in 1625 — men who went with 
the same current of literature, one in Spain, the other in Italy, 
during the reign of James I. in England. In Spain the writers 
corresponding to our Earlier and Later Euphuists are known 
as the Conceptistos, or "Conceited School," and the Cultos, 
who cherished what they called a " Cultivated Style " in poems 
and romances. Oar Later Euphuism was English cousin to 
the cirftismo of Spain, and to the style called, after Marini, by 
Italians, the stile Marinesco. Here, also, we are at the begin- 
ning of the history of the false worship of diction. 

8. John Dorms was born in 1573. the son of a London 
merchant. He was taught at home till, in his eleventh year. 
he was sent to Hart Hall, Oxford. At fourteen he left Oxford 
for Cambridge, where he remained till he was seventeen, but 
took no degree, because his family was Roman Catholic, and 
would not let him take the required oath. He left Cambridge 
for London, and studied law at Lincoln's Inn. His father died 
at that time, leaving him three thousand pounds. His mother 
sought to bring him to the faith of his parents ; and unsettle- 
ment of mind caused him to make a special stud}' of the con- 
troversies of the time between the Roman Catholics and the 
Reformers. As a storehouse of opinion on the controversy, 
young Donne fastened upon the works of Cardinal Bellarmin. 
He went with the expeditions of the Earl of Essex, in 1596 
and 1597 ; and spent afterwards some years in Italy and Spain ; 
returned to England, and became chief secretary to Lord Chan- 
cellor EUesmere. He held that office five years, during which 
he fell in love with Anne More, a niece of Lady EUesmere, 
who lived in the family. Her father, Sir George More, heard 
of this, and carried away the young lady to his house in Sur- 
rey ; but a secret marriage was effected. When this was told 
to Sir George, he caused Lord EUesmere to dismiss his secre- 
tary, whom apparent ruin could not keep from a play on 
words, according to the fashion of the time ; for in writing the 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN DONNE. 311 

I 
sad news to Ms wife he added to his signature the line, " John 

Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." Donne was imprisoned for a 
time, and when he was free his wife was kept from him. He 
sued at law to recover her. She came to him when his means 
were almost gone. It was then urged upon Donne that he 
should take orders in the church ; but he hesitated, and pre- 
ferred study of civil and canon law. An influential kinsman of 
the family succeeded in persuading Donne's father-in-law to 
cease from wrath, and pay a portion with his daughter, at the 
rate of eighty pounds a year. Donne remained very much 
dependent on the liberality of friends, and was still studying 
points of controvers}* between the English and the Romish 
Church, when a home was given to him in the house of • Sir 
Robert Druiy, in Drury Lane. Donne came now into contact 
with King James, discussed theology with him, and wrote, at 
his request, a book on the taking of the oaths of supremacy 
and allegiance, called "Pseudo-Martyr," published in 1610. 
This pleased the king so much that he required Donne to be a 
clergyman. Donne made what interest he could to have the 
king's good-will shown in the form of secular employment ; but 
James had made up his mind that Donne should be a preacher, 
and, in spite of himself, he was forced into the church .as the 
only wa}* by which he was allowed a chance of prospering. 
"When Donne had at last taken orders, King James made him 
his chaplain, and in the same month called on Cambridge to 
make him doctor of divinity. He became a famous preacher 
and a fashionable poet, was lecturer at Lincoln's Inn till he was 
joined in a mission to Germairy, and about a year after his 
return was made by the king, in 1621, Dean of St. Paul's, 
while the vicarage of St. Dunstan's in the West, and yet 
another benefice, fell to him almost at the same time. Donne 
Survived King James, and died in the year 1631. His lighter 
occasional poems were not published until after his death. In 
James's reign he, like other poets, published in 1613 "An 
Elegy on the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince 
Henry." A severe illness of his own led also to the publica- 
tion in 1624 of his " Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and 
Several Steps in Sickness ; " and in 1625 he published a poem 



312 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D, 1600 

upon mortalit}^ since that was not out of harmony with his 
sacred office. It was called " An Anatomy of the World, 
wherein, by the untimely Death of Mrs. Eliz. Drury, the Frailty 
and Decay of this whole World is represented." From this 
poem we take, for specimen of artificial diction, a passage that 
contains by rare chance one conceit rising in thought and ex- 
pression to the higher level of Elizabethan poetry : 

"She, in whose body (if we dare preferre 
This low world to so high a marke as shee) 
The Western treasure, Easterne spicery, 
Europe,- and Afrique, and the unknowne rest 
Were easily found, or what in them was best; 
And when we have made this large discoverie 
Of all, in her some one part then will bee 
Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is 
Enough to make twenty such worlds as this ; 
Shee, whom had they knowne, who did first betroth 
The tutelar angels, and assigned one, both 
To nations, cities, and to companies, 
To functions, offices, and dignities, 
And to each several man, to him, and him, 
They would have given her one for every limbe: 
Shee, of whose soule, if we may say 'twas gold, 
Her body was th' Electrum, and did hold 
Many degrees of that ; wee understood 
Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought 
That one might almost say, her body thought. 
Shee, shee, thus richly and largely hous'd, is gone." 

Unreality of a style that sacrifices sense to ingenuity is most 
felt in Donne's lighter poems. The collection of the verse of 
the late Dean of St. Paul's published in 1635, as "Poems by 
J. D., with Elegies on the Author's Death," opens with an 
ingenious piece, of which the sense is, so far as it has any, that 
a woman's honor is not worth a flea. Donne was unquestion- 
ably a man with much religious earnestness, but he was also a 
poet who delighted men of fashion. 

9. The literary affectations of the time were reduced to absurdity by 
Thomas Coryat, and John Taylor, the Water Poet. Thomas Coryat, 
son of George Coryat, rector of Odcombe, Somerset, and educated at 
Gloucester Hall, Oxford, lived a fantastic life at court for the amuse- 



To A . D . 1 650.] JOHN TA YL OR. 313 

ment of Prince Henry. In 1608 he travelled on foot for five months in 
France, Italy, and Germany, walking 1,975 miles, and more than half 
the distance in one pair of shoes, which were only once mended. The 
shoes, when he came home, were hung up in Odcombe Church, and 
kept there as the ''thousand mile shoes" till 1702. The travel in them 
was described in a hook published in 1611, as '■ Coryat's Crudities hastily 
Gobbled Up in Five Months' Travels in France, etc. Introduced by An 
Odcombian Banquet of nearly Sixty Copies of Verses," which were 
praises written in jest by nearly all the poets of the day. This book was 
followed by "Coryats Crambe; or, his Colewort Twise Sodden, and now 
Served with other Macaronicke Dishes as the Second Course to his 
Crudities." In 1612, Coryat gathered the people of Odcombe at their 
market cross, and took leave of them for a ten-years' ramble. He 
visited Greece, Egypt, India, and died at Surat, in 1617. There was the 
English love of sturdy enterprise and adventure underlying Coryat's 
endeavor to delight his public. 

John Taylor was a poor man's son from Gloucestershire, who be- 
came a Thames waterman, after he had served under Elizabeth in six- 
teen voyages; he was with Essex at Cadiz and the Azores. He read 
many books, and he wrote sixty-three booklets to amuse the public with 
their oddities. He made presents of his little books to customers and 
courtiers, and took whatever they might give in return. One of his 
books told how he won a bet that he would row in his boat to the 
Continent and back again within a certain time. It appeared as " Tay- 
lor's Travels in Germanie; or, Three Weekes, Three Daies, and Three 
Houres Observations and Travel from London to Hamburg. . . . Dedi- 
cated for the present to the absent Odcombian knight errant, Sir 
Thomas Coriat, Great Britain's Error and the World's Mirror." This 
appeared in the year of Coryat's death at Surat. Another of Taylor's 
freaks was a journey on foot from London to Edinburgh, " not carrying 
any money to and fro, neither begging, borrowing, nor asking meat, 
drink, or lodging." This yielded, in 1618, a book, "The Pennyles 
Pilgrimage; or, the Moneylesse Perambulation of John Taylor, alias 
the King's Majestie's Water Poet, from London to Edenborough on 
Foot." Another of his adventures was a voyage from London to 
Queenborough in a paper boat, with two stock-fish tied to two canes for 
oars. It was celebrated, in 1623, by "The Praise of Hempseed, with 
the Voyage of Mr. Roger Bird and the Writer hereof, in a Boat of 
Brown Paper, from London to Quinborough in Kent. As also a Fare- 
well to the Matchless Deceased Mr. Thomas Coriat. Concluding with 
Commendations of the famous River of Thames." All this was a little 
tract of twenty-four leaves. So we come down from Elizabeth to James 
I. ; from Frobisher, and Drake, and Raleigh, to poor Tom Coryat and 
John Taylor, His Majesty's Water Poet. But although the court lost 
dignity, the spirit of the people was unchanged. Taylor wrote on 
through the reign of Cbarles I., and took part in the civil war by 



314 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

discharging squibs of verse against the Puritans. He had then an inn 
at Oxford. When the king's cause was lost, he set up an inn in London, 
by Long Acre, with the sign of "The Mourning Crown;" but he was 
obliged to take that down, and set up his own portrait in place of it. He 
died in 1654. 

10. Francis Quarles was born in 1592, and was educated 
at Christ's College, Cambridge, and at Lincoln's Inn. He was 
cupbearer to James's daughter, the Queen of Bohemia, and 
afterwards served in Ireland as secretaiy to Archbishop Usher. 
His first publication was in 1620, " A Feast for Wormes, in a 
Poem on the History of Jonah;" with " Pentalogia ; or, the 
Quintessence of Meditation." In 1621 followed " Hadassa ; 
or, the History of Queen Esther," these histories being in ten- 
syllabled couplets, and, in the same measure, " Argalus and 
Parthenia," a poem in three books, founded on a part of 
Sidney's "Arcadia." Then came, in 1624, "Job Militant, 
with Meditations Divine and Moral;" also " Sion's Elegies, 
wept b} T Jeremiah the Prophet; " and, in 1625, "Sion's Son- 
nets, sung by Solomon the King, and periphrased." The 
writing of Quarles in the reign of James I. consisted, then, of 
"Argalus and 'Parthenia," and those pieces which were col- 
lected into one volume, in 1630, as " Divine Poems." He 
produced in 1632 " Divine Fancies, Digested into Epigrammes, 
Meditations, and Observations;" and the quaintest and most 
popular of his books of verse, "Emblems Divine and Moral," 
appeared in the same year with the "Emblems" by George 
Wither. The taste for emblem pictures, with ingenious and 
wise interpretation of them, had been especially established 
by the " Emblems," in Latin verse, of the great Italian lawyer, 
Andrea Alciati, who died in 1550. These "Emblems" were 
translated into Italian, French, and Spanish, and read in 
schools. The taste they established was widely diffused 
throughout the seventeenth century. The prevalent taste for 
ingenious thought, blending with the religious feeling of the 
people, helped especially to a revival of emblem writing in 
Holland and England ; and in Holland the " Moral Emblems " 
of Jacob Cats, statesman as well as poet, who was born in 1577, 
came twice as ambassador to England and outlived Quarles, 
were in very high repute. Quarles, in Ireland with Archbishop 



To A.D. 1650.] GEORGE HERBERT. 315 

Usher, suffered by the Irish insurrection of 1641. He came to 
England, took part with the royal causo in a book called " The 
Loyal Convert," joined the king at Oxford, and was ruined in 
the civil war. He had been twice married, and had by his 
first wife eighteen children. Quarles died, overwhelmed with 
troubles, in 1644. 

11. George Herbert was born in 1593, and died in 1633. 
His father died when he was four years old, and till he was 
twelve he was in the care of a very good mother at home, with 
a chaplain for tutor. He was then sent to Westminster School, 
and at fifteen elected from the school for Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. In 1615 George Herbert became M.A. and Fellow of 
his College. In 1619 he was chosen orator for the university, 
and so remained for the next eight 3-ears. His wit in use of 
the labored style of the time delighted King James ; for wiien 
his Majesty made the university a present of his " Basilicon 
Doron," which had been published in 1599, George Herbert 
ended for the Cambridge authorities his acknowledgment of the 
roj'al gift, with the remark, put neatly in Latin verse, that thc} r 
could not now have the Vatican and the Bodleian quoted against 
them ; one book w T as their library. James, upon this, observed 
that he thought George Herbert the jewel of the university. 
The Cambridge Public Orator, who was skilled in French, 
Italian, and Spanish, thought he might rise at court, and was 
often in London. The king gave him a sinecure worth a hun- 
dred and twent}- pounds a year. With this, his fellowship, his 
payment as Orator, and private income, he could make a good 
figure at court, and he was usually near the king. But the 
death of two of his most powerful friends, and soon afterwards 
of King James himself, put an end to George Herbert's ambi- 
tion to become one da} T a secretary of state. He resolved then 
to follow his mother's often-repeated counsel, and, at the begin- 
ning of the reign of Charles I., George Herbert took orders. 
He obtained, in 1626, the prebend of Leighton Ecclesia, in the 
diocese of Lincoln, and w r ith help of his own friends handsomely 
rebuilt the decayed church of that village. The Rev. George 
Herbert, cheerful and kind, tall and very lean, was ill for a } T ear 
with one of his brothers, at Woodford, in Essex, and then 



316 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

again recruiting health in Wiltshire, at the house of the Earl 
of Danby, whose brother had become his mother's second 
husband. In April, 1630, he was inducted into his living of 
Bemerton, a mile from Salisbury. He was then thirty-six years 
old. The pure beauty of the evening of George Herbert's life 
— the three years at Bemerton before his death in 1633 — was 
expressed in his verse as in his actions. With Hooker's faith- 
ful regard for the church system he maintained it in his parish 
according to his own standard of purity, blended with love and 
a free-handed charity , with poetry and music. He was a skilful 
musician, and went into Salisbury twice a week on certain days 
for the cathedral service. In 1631 George Herbert's poems 
appeared as "The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejacu- 
lations." The forced ingenuity of the time is in them, but 
the ingenuity so forced is that of a quick wit, and the spirit 
glorifies the letter ; the words, too, are by the writer's sense 
of harmony tuned often exquisitely to the soul within them. 
Herbert's "Priest to the Temple; or, the Countiy Parson," 
was first printed under the Commonwealth, in 1652. 

12. Richard Crashaw, son of a preacher zealous against Catholicism, 
was born about the year of Shakespeare's death, and was educated at 
the Charterhouse and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Before he was 
twenty he published anonymously sacred epigrams in Latin. He gradu- 
ated, became a fellow of Peterhouse, was expelled from Cambridge in 
1644 for refusing to subscribe the Covenant, became a Boman Catholic, 
and went to Paris. There, about 1646, the year of the publication of 
his "Steps to the Temple," he was found by Cowley, and commended 
to the friendship of Queen Henrietta Maria, from whom he had letters 
to Borne. At Eome he became secretary to a cardinal, and Canon of 
the Church of Loretto. Crashaw died about 1650. With much more of 
the Later Euphuism than is to be found in lyrics of those cavalier poets 
who took active part in the stir of the civil war, Crashaw' s religious 
poems, "Steps to the Temple," are not less purely devotional, though 
they have less beauty and force, than those of Herbert, whom he imi- 
tated, and of whose volume he wrote to a lady, with a gift of it, 
"Divinest love lies in this book : " 

" And though Herbert's name do owe 
These devotions, fairest, know 
That while I lay them on the shrine 
Of your white hand, they are mine." 

Crashaw's occasional poems are collected as "The Delights of the 



To A. D. 1650.] GEORGE CHAPMAN. 317 

Muses." One of them was sent to his friend Cowley, with two green 
and backward apricots to point comparison with fruit of his genius so 
early ripe : 

" 'Twas only Paradise, 'tis only thou, 

Whose fruit and blossoms both bless the same bough." 

13. To write compact and witty characters of men and women was a 
fancy of the time, derived in the first instance from Theophrastus, and 
associated with the quick growth of the drama. Such pithy character- 
writing had been prefixed formally as " The Character of the Persons " 
to Ben Jonson's ''Every Man Out of his Humor;" and the dialogue of 
the second act of his "Cynthia's Revels," produced in 1600, is chiefly 
made up of character-writing. It was the manner of this character- 
writing that suggested to young Milton his lines on the death of Hobson, 
the university carrier. 

A poet who had much skill in this sort of work was Sir Thomas 
Overbury, who was murdered in 1613, and who was in repute among 
the writers of his day for a poem on the choice of a wife, called "A Wife, 
now a Widowe," published the year after his murder, and reprinted in 
the same year with the addition of twenty-one " Characters." 

Two other writers to be remembered for character-poetry are William 
Habington and John Earle. Habington was born early in the reign of 
James I., and was the son of a Worcestershire Roman Catholic con- 
demned to abide always in Worcestershire, for having concealed in his 
house persons accused of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. The father, 
since he was to see so much of Worcestershire, wrote a history of the 
county. The son, educated at St. Omer's, came home and married 
Lucy, daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Powis. In the name of 
Castara he paid honor to her through some lyrics of pure love, as the 
type of modest, spiritual womanhood. Habington' s "Castara" first ap- 
peared in two parts, in 1634; the second edition, adding three prose 
characters and twenty-six new poems, appeared in 1635 , and a third m 
1640, enlarged with a new part, containing a Character of "The Holy 
Man" and twenty-two poems, chiefly sacred. Habington also wrote a 
tragi-comedy of "The Queen of Aragon." published in 1640. In that 
year appeared also his "History of Edward the Fourth, King of Eng- 
land," written at the king's request. John Earle, Fellow of Merton, 
published, in 1628, his collection of Characters, as " Micro-cosmographie ; 
or, a Peece of the World Discovered; in Essayes and Characters." 
Earle was then twenty-seven years old. He became afterwards chaplain 
to the Earl of Pembroke, and was Bishop of Salisbury when he died, 
in 1665. 

14. The most celebrated translator of this period was George 
Chapman, noted also as a poet and a dramatist. He was born 
in 1557 or 1559, at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. He was called 
afterwards, by William Browne, " The Shepherd of fair Hitch- 



313 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

ing Hill." About 1574 lie was sent to Trinity College. Oxford. 
where he fastened with especial delight on the Greek and Roman 
classics. After two years at Oxford, he left without a degree. 
Nothing is known of him as a writer before 1594. when he pub- 
lished ••— y.ih jtxto s \ The Shadow of Night: containing two 
poetical hymnes devised by G. C. Gent." In the next year. 
15 'J 5. this was followed by " Ovid's Banquet of Sence. a Coro- 
net for his Mistresse Philosophic, and his amorous Zodiacke." 
In 1598 appeared the first section of the main work of George 
Chapman" s life, his translation of Homer, in " Seaven Bookes of 
the Iliades of Homere. Prince of Poets, translated according 
to the Greeke. in Judgement of his best Commentaries, by 
George Chapman. Gent." The seven books were the first and 
second, and the seventh to the eleventh. They are in the four- 
teen-syllabled measure, to which he adhered throughout the 
Iliad and Odyssey : but there was a separate issue by him of a 
version of "Achilles' Shield."' in 1598. in ten-syllabled verse. 

Chapman had now also begun his career as a dramatist, and 
in 1598 appeared his first printed comedy. " The Blind Beggar 
of Alexandria,'' which had been acted sundry times by the 
Earl of Nottingham's servants. The same company acted his 
second comedy, printed in 1599. ••An humorous Daves Mirth."' 
At the end of Elizabeth's reign. Chapman was at work still on 
his Homer, but had not yet issued another section of it. Dur- 
ing the reign of James I., he was an active dramatist. In 
1605, besides •• Eastward Ho," in which he had a hand, his 
comedy of ••All Fools" was printed: in 1G06 "Monsieur 
d '"Olive" and ••The Gentleman Usher : " in 1607 his tragedy 
of •• Bussy d'Ambois," which kept the stage for some time after 
his death. Other tragedies and comedies followed. But his 
chief work was still at the translation of Homer, on which he 
was engaged throughout the reign of James I. Twelve books 
of Homer's IHiad. translated by George Chapman, appeared 
about 10 lo : and in the following year, the whole twenty-four 
books of "The Iliads of Homer."" dedicated to Prince Henry, 
who died in November, 1612. This was followed by the twelve 
first books of the Odyssey, about 1014. and in 1616 the whole 
twenty-four books of " Homer's Odysseys, translated according 



ToA.D. 1650.] DR. BARTEN HOLTDAY. 319 

to the Greek." About the year of Shakespeare's death (Chap- 
man's folios are not dated), Chapman's "Iliad" and "Odys- 
sey" appeared together as "The Whole Works of Homer, 
Prince of Poets." Chapman proceeded then to translate the 
Homeric ITymns, and "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," ascribed 
to Homer. This translation appeared at the end of the reign 
of James I., as " The Crown of all Homer's Works, Batra- 
chomyoniachia, the Battle of Frogs and Mice ; his Hymns and 
Epigrams." Because of the vigor of the Elizabethan time, and 
the fact that Chapman was a poet, this translation is the crown 
of the works of Chapman. 
"He leapt upon the sounding earth, and shook his lengthful dart, 

And everywhere he breathed exhorts, and stirr'd up every heart. 

A dreadful fight he set on foot. His soldiers straight turned head. 

The Greeks stood firm. In both the hosts the field was perfected. 

But Agamemnon foremost still did all his side exceed, 

And would not be the first in name unless the first in deed." 

Thus sang George Chapman, who was himself the Agamemnon 
of the host of the translators of Homer. 

Another good translator of this time was George Sandys, second 
son of the Sandys, Archbishop of York, whom Aylmer succeeded in the 
bishopric of London. George Sandys was born at Bishopthorpe in 
1578, and educated at Oxford. In 1610 he set out upon the travels of 
which he published an account in 1615, as " A Kelation of a Journey 
begun A. D. 1610. Four Books containing a description of the Turkish 
Empire, of Egypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote Parts of Italy, and 
Islands adjoining." He then worked at his translation of Ovid's " Meta- 
morphoses; " the first five books appearing in the reign of James I. He 
published his complete translation of the "Metamorphoses" in 1626, 
and in 1636 a " Paraphrase of the Psalms," with music of tunes by Henry 
Lawes. Sandys died in 1644. 

Dr. Barten Holyday, chaplain to Charles, was born in 1593, the son 
of an Oxford tailor. He was educated at Christ Church, took orders, 
went to Spain with Sir Francis Stewart, and after his return was chap- 
lain to the king, and Archdeacon of Oxford. He was a learned man and 
timid politician. He is hardly to be called a dramatist, although he 
wrote a comedy, published in 1630, called " Technogamia; or, the Mar- 
riage of the Arts." He also made translations of " Juvenal and Per- 
sius" into poor verse, with many learned illustrative notes. He died in 
1661. 

15. There were at this time many men distinguished as wits, 
satirists, and song-writers. The following are the most nota- 



320 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

ble : Joseph Hall, Sir John Harington, Richard Corbet, John 
Cleveland, Thomas Carew, Sir John Denham, Sir John Suck- 
ling, William Cartwright, Richard Lovelace, and Robert Her- 
rick. 

Joseph Hall was born in 1574, at Bristow Park by Ashb}'- 
de-la-Zouch, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. 
In 1597, at the age of twenty-three, he published "'Virgide- 
miarum, Six Bookes ; First Three Bookes of Toothlesse Satyrs : 
1. Poeticall ; 2. Academicall; 3. Morall." In the following 
year the work was completed by ' ' Virgidemiarum : the Three 
Last Bookes of Bj'ting Satyrs." It means nothing particular 
to sa} T that these satires were burnt by order of the Archbishop 
of Canterbury. Whitgift and Bancroft, Archbishop of Canter- 
bury and Bishop of London, as censors of the press, distin- 
guished themselves, in 1599, by ordering the burning of much 
literature, Marlowe's " Ovid," Marston's " Pygmalion's Im- 
age," Hall's " Satires," the Epigrams of Davies and others, 
the tracts of Nash and Harvey, and decreeing that no satires 
or epigrams should be printed for the future. 

Joseph Hall's six books, " Virgidemiarum," i.e., of rod-har- 
vests, stripes or blows, were the work of a clever young man 
who had read Juvenal and Persius and the satires of Ariosto, 
and who, because he was the first to write English satire in the 
manner of Juvenal, ignorantly believed himself to be the first 
English satirist. " I first adventure," he said in his prologue, 

"I first adventure, follow me who list, 
And be the second English satirist." 

The mistake is of no consequence. Hall's satires are in 
rhyming couplets of ten-s} T llabled lines ; he thought English 
rhyme inferior to Latin quantity, but saw that the Latin metres 
could not be applied to English verse, and laughed at Stanihurst : 

" Whoever saw a colt, wanton and wild, 
Yok'd with a slow-foot ox on fallow field, 
Can right areed how handsomely besets 
Dull spondees with the English dactylets. 
If Jove speak English in a thund'ring cloud, 
' Thwick thwack,' and ' riff raff,' roars he out aloud. 
Fie on the forged mint that did create 
New coin of words never articulate ! ' ' 



To A.D. 1650.] JOSEPH HALL. 321 

Hall laughed at the rising drama, crying : 

" Shame that the Muses should be bought and sold 
For every peasant's brass, on each scaffold." 

He laughed at what he called ' ' pot fury ' ' of the dramatists : 
" One higher pitch' d doth set his soaring thought 
On crowned kings, tbat fortune hath low brought; 
Or some upreared, high-aspiring swain, 
As it might be the Turkish Tamburlaine ; 
Then weeneth he his base, drink-drowned spright 
Eapt to the threefold loft of heaven hight, 
When he conceives upon his feigned stage 
The stalking steps of his great personage, 
Graced with huff-cap terms and thund'ring threats 
That his poor hearers' hair quite upright sets." 

But while Hall attacked the " terms Italianate, big-sounding 
sentences and words of state " upon the stage, he paid homage 
to Spenser : 

" Let no rebel satyr dare traduce 
Th' eternal legends of thy faery muse, 
Renowned Spenser; whom no earthly wight 
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight." 

Only he paired m the next line Du Bartas with Ariosto : 
" Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost." The satirist in the 
golden time of Elizabethan vigor talked as usual of the good 
old times that were gone, when luxury was not : 

" Thy grandsires' words savored of thrifty leeks 
Or manly garlicke. 



But thou canst mask in garish gaudery, 

To suit a fool's far-fetched livery. 

A French head join'd to neck Italian; 

Thy thighs from Germany, and breast from Spain ; 

An Englishman in none, a fool in all; 

Many in one, and one in several. 

Then men were men; but now the greater part 

Beasts are in life, and women are in heart." 

If we go back to Occleve, or farther back to Gower, we find 
that the note has always been the same ; sound and true in the 
steady fixing of attention upon vices and follies to be conquered 
(since there is small hope for a people that will only praise 
itself) , but with innocent delusion of a bygone golden age. 



322 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

Joseph Hall, who thus early distinguished himself as a satir- 
ist, took holy orders, rose to be Bishop of Norwich, and acquired 
great reputation as a prose- writer and a theologian. 

16. Sir John Harington, born in 1561, and educated at Eton and 
Cambridge, published, in 1591, " Orlando Furioso in English Heroical 
Verse." In 1596 he wrote a witty book, " The Metamorphosis of Ajax." 
Other works of his are " The Englishman's Doctor, or the School of 
Salerne," 1609; "Most Elegant and Witty Epigrams of Sir J. H.," 
1615; and especially " Nugse Antiquse, being a Miscellaneous Collection 
of Original Papers in Prose and Verse." 

17. Richard Corbet, born in 1582, was the son of a famous gardener, 
from whom he inherited some land and money. He was educated at 
Westminster School and Oxford; became M.A. in 1605, and was in re- 
pute first as a university wit and poet, and then as a quaint preacher, 
who got patronage at James's court. He married in 1625, became 
Bishop of Oxford in 1629, of Norwich in 1632, and died in 1635. He 
was a stout royalist, worked with Laud, but was less bitter, and wrote 
merry squibs against the Puritans. A poem to his little son, and one on 
the death of his father, show his kindliness. One of sundry recorded 
jokes of Bishop Corbet's is of the upsetting of his coach, when he and 
his chaplain, Dr. Stubbings, who was very fat, were spilt into a muddy 
lane. Stubbings, the bishop said, was up to his elbows in mud ; and he 
was up to his elbows in Stubbings. A very small volume appeared in 
1648, issued by Corbet's family, entitled " Poetica Stromata; or, a Col- 
lection of Sundry Pieces in Poetry: Drawn by the known and approved 
hand of R. C." Written copies of short satires, songs, and other pieces, 
passed from hand to hand, so that a man might have high reputation in 
society as wit and poet without the printing of a line of his during his 
lifetime, except now and then, when Henry Lawes or some other com- 
poser had set a song to music. 

18. John Cleveland, for nine years a fellow of St. John's College, 
was eminent in poetry and oratory, and was the first to pour out from 
the Royalist side defiant verse against the Puritans. Turned out of his 
fellowship, he joined the king at Oxford; then went to the garrison at 
Newark-on-Trent, where he was made Judge-Advocate, and resented 
the king's order to surrender. He was then in prison at Yarmouth till 
the Commonwealth, when he obtained his release from Cromwell, lived 
quietly in Gray's Inn, and died in 1659. Cleveland was the best of those 
Royalist poets who chiefly wrote partisan satire. The most popular, 
perhaps, was Alexander Brome, an attorney in the Lord Mayor's 
Court, who was not thirty at the date of the king's execution, and 
whose songs were trolled over their cups by Royalists of every degree. 

19. Thomas Carew, born in Devonshire in 1589, was an officer of 
the household of Charles L, a lively man, whose little poems were in 
good request, but, except when set to music, were not published in his 



To A.D. 1650.] RICHARD LOVELACE. 323 

lifetime. He died in 1639. The musicians "William and Henry Lawes 
set many songs of Carew's, and were the chief writers of music for 
the poems that abounded in this reign. 

20. Sir John Denham was born in Dublin in 1615, son of a Baron 
of Exchequer. He was an idle student at Oxford, and joined gambling 
with study of law at Lincoln's Inn. But he checked himself, published 
an "Essay on Gaming," and in 1636 translated the second book of the 
"iEneid." In 1641 he produced his tragedy of "The Sophy," which 
was acted at a private house in Blackfriars, with so much success that 
Waller said he " broke out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand 
strong, when nobody was aware, or in the least suspected it." The play 
was followed, in 1643, by his " Cooper's Hill," a contemplative poem on 
the view over the Thames and towards London, from a hill in the neigh- 
borhood of Windsor Castle. Denham was actively employed in the 
king's service, but in the midst of his labors he found time to publish 
a translation of " Cato Major." He lived to receive homage among 
poets of the reign of Charles II. 

21. Sir John Suckling was born in 1609, the son of the Comptroller 
of the Household to James I. Suckling was an overtaught child, who 
could speak Latin at the age of five; but he cast aside, as a young man, 
his father's gravity, was on active service for six months in the army of 
Gustavus Adolphus, and in the days of Charles I. lived in London as 
light wit, light lyric poet, light dramatist, and liberal friend of men of 
genius. His plays were "Aglaura," " Brennoralt," and "The Gob- 
lins." He spent twelve thousand pounds on rich equipment of a troop 
of a hundred horse to aid the king, and died in 1641, of a wound in the 
heel : a penknife was put into his boot by a servant who had robbed him, 
and wished to delay pursuit. 

22. William Cartwright also wrote plays and lyrics, was about two 
years younger than Suckling, and also died at the age of thirty-two. 
He was the son of a Gloucestershire gentleman, who had wasted his 
means, and who lived by innkeeping at Cirencester. William Cartwright 
was taught in the Cirencester Grammar School, at Westminster School, 
and Christ Church, Oxford. He became M.A. in 1635, took orders, and 
was a famous preacher. He studied sixteen hours a day, preached ex- 
cellent sermons, wrote excellent lyrics, and also four plays; one of them, 
" The Royal Slave," a tragi-comedy, acted before the king and queen in 
1636, by the students of Christ Church, Oxford. Cartwright was also an 
admired lecturer at Oxford on metaphysics, worked hard as one of the 
council of war to provide for the king's troops at Oxford, was beloved 
of Ben Jonson, who said of him, " My son Cartwright writes all like a 
man," and was praised by his bishop as "the utmost man could come 
to." He died in 1643, of the camp-fever that killed many at Oxford. 

23. Richard Lovelace, the brilliant and handsome cavalier 
poet, died miserably during the Commonwealth. He was born 



3 24 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITER A TUBE. [ A . D . 1 600 

in the same year as Cowley, 1618, the eldest son of Sir Wil- 
liam Lovelace, of Woolwich, and was educated at Charterhouse 
School, and Gloucester Hall, Oxford. Lovelace was so hand- 
some, that in 1636, though a student of but two years' standing, 
he was made, at the request of a great lad} T , M.A., among per- 
sons of quality who were being so honored while the court was 
for a few days at Oxford. He was the first and last under- 
graduate who was made Master of Arts for his beauty. Love- 
lace attached himself to the court ; served in 1639 as an ensign 
in the Scottish expedition, afterwards as captain ; wrote a 
tragedy called "The Soldier; " retired to his estate of Love- 
lace Place, at Canterbury ; was elected to go up to the House 
of Commons with the Kentish petition for restoring the king to 
his rights, and for this was committed to the Gatehouse Prison 
at Westminster, April 30, 1642. There he wrote his song, 
" To Althea, from Prison," which contains the stanza : 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 

ISTor iron bars a cage ; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 

That for an hermitage. 
If I have freedom in my love, 

And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone that soar above 

Enjoy such liberty." 

After some weeks of imprisonment, Lovelace "was released on 
bail, and lived in London beyond his income, as a friend of the 
king's cause and of good poets. In 1646 he served in the 
French army, and was wounded at Dunkirk. Report of his 
death caused Lucy Sacheverell, the Lucasta (lux casta, "chaste 
light ") of his poetry, to disappoint him of her hand by marry- 
ing another. In 1648, Lovelace returned to England, and was 
soon a political prisoner in Peterhouse, Aldersgate Street, 
where he arranged his poems for the press — "Lucasta: 
Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, etc.," published in 1649. 
Richard Lovelace died, it is said, in an alley in Shoe Lane, 
in 1658. 

24. To these poets who were battling, suffering, and singing 
in the days of Charles I., and out of the midst of whom rose 
the first music of Milton, there is one yet to be added — a men 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTOK. 325 

twenty-seven years older than Lovelace and Cowley, but who 
sang when the}' were singing, and outlived them both. This 
was the Rev. Robert Herrick, Vicar of Dean Prior, in Devon- 
shire. Robert Herrick, born in 1591, was the fourth son of 
a silversmith in Cheapside. His university was Cambridge, and 
it was in 1629 that he was presented to his living, in the village 
of Dean Prior, four miles from Ashburton, where he spent the 
next nineteen 3-ears of his life, and said : 

" More discontents I never had 
Since I was born, than here ; 
Where I have been, and still am sad, 
In this dull Devonshire." 

There Herrick, with great nose and double chin, lived as a 
bachelor vicar, attended by his faithful servant, Prudence Bald- 
win, and a pet pig, which he taught to drink out of a tankard. 
In 1648 he was ejected from his living, and betook himself to 
London, where he had wits and poets for companions, and 
published at once, for help to a subsistence, his delightful love 
lyrics, epigrams, and scraps of verse in many moods ; some- 
times reflecting license of the times, not of the man ; includ- 
ing also strains of deep religious feeling. These pieces — many 
of them only two or four lines long — he had written in the 
West of England, and therefore (from hesperis, "western") 
he called them " Hesperides ; or, Works both Humane and 
Divine." His pious pieces were arranged under the name of 
" Noble Numbers." 

25. The position of John Milton in his own age is so ex- 
alted, on account of his spiritual nobility as well as of the 
power of his genius, that he seems to stand apart from his 
contemporaries, and to constitute a literary order b}- himself. 
His intellectual range was great ; in scholarship and in prose 
writing, he was one of the chief men of his time ; by his exqui- 
site creations of " Comus," a masque, and of " Samson Agonis- 
tes," a tragedy, he takes high rank in dramatic literature; 
in the forms of the ode, the elegy, and the sonnet, he is, 
perhaps, unsurpassed among all our writers ; finally he is not 
only the greatest epic poet that English literature has had, but 
the greatest epic poet that an} r literature has had since Dante. 



326 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

He was born in Bread Street, London, on the 9th of Decem- 
ber, 1608. His father, also named John, had settled in London 
as a scrivener, had prospered, and had acquired considerable 
note as a lover and composer of music. From his father, the 
poet evidently derived his own delight in music and his own 
aptitude for it ; and his musical sense greatly influenced his 
own work as a man of letters, — giving him refreshment amid 
heavy labors, suggesting to him many ideas and images, and 
especially prompting him in the handling of words both for 
prose and for verse. 

Milton was a schoolboy at St. Paul's from 1620 until a few 
months before the close of the reign of James I. His father 
too readily encouraged the boy's eagerness for study ; he had 
teaching at home as well as at school, suffered headaches, and 
laid the foundation of weak sight by sitting up till midnight at 
his lessons. At St. Paul's School Milton found a bosom-friend 
in Charles Diodati, the son of a physician who was then in good 
practice in London, and who came of a highly cultivated family 
of Italian Protestants established at Geneva. Charles Diodati 
was the friend to whom Milton spoke his inmost thoughts ; and 
their friendship outlasted their boyhood, and was interrupted 
only by death. Diodati left school more than two j'ears before 
Milton, and went to Trinity College, Oxford, where, in Novem- 
ber, 1623, he joined in writing Latin obituary verse upon the 
death of William Camden. But John Milton and Charles Dio- 
dati had their homes in the same town, and their friendship 
was easily maintained by visits and correspondence. There is 
a Greek letter written in London from Diodati to Milton, hoping 
for fine weather and cheerfulness in a holiday the two friends 
meant to have next day together on the Thames. In February, 
1625, John Milton was admitted at Christ's College, Cam- 
bridge, aged two months over sixteen. In the following winter. 
his sister's first-born child, a daughter, died in infancy; and 
verses upon that family grief open the series of Milton's poems 
with a strain of love. He practised himself as a student, both 
in Latin and in poetry, by writing Latin elegies. One. -written 
in September, 1626, was on the death of Bishop Andrewes. In 
1629, on the 26th of March, Milton graduated as B.A. On the 



ToA.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON. 327 

following Christmas Day, his age being twent3 T -one, he wrote 
his hymn, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." It may 
have then come into young Milton's mind to form a series of 
odes on the great festivals of the Christian Church ; for on the 
1st of Januaiy the ode on the Nativity was followed by one on 
" The Circumcision ; " and when Easter came he began a poem 
on "The Passion," of which he wrote only eight stanzas, and 
then broke off. "This subject," says the appended note, 
"the authpr finding to be above the } T ears he had when he 
wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it un- 
finished." 

In 1631 the unexpected death of the } T oung Marchioness of 
Winchester was lamented bj 7 poets, and among them by Ben 
Jonson in his latter 3~ears, by Milton at the opening of his 
career. On his birthday, the 9th of December, in the same 
year 1631, Milton wrote that sonnet "on his being arrived at 
the age of twenty-three," which is the preface to his whole life 
as a man. He refers in it to his boyish aspect ; feels his mind 
unripe, his advance slow, his achievement little ; and adds these 
lines of self-dedication, to which he was true in his whole after- 
life : 

" Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 

It shall be still in strictest measure even 

To that same lot, however mean or high, 

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven : 

All is, if I have grace to use it so, 

As ever in my great Task-Master's eye." 

Already Milton showed himself an exact student of his art. 
This sonnet, and every other sonnet written by him, was true to 
the minutest detail in its technical construction — true not only 
in arrangement of the rhymes, but in that manner of devel- 
oping the thought for which the structure of this kind of poem 
was invented. The sonnet of self-dedication Milton wrote when 
his college life was near its close. In July, 1632, he graduated 
as M.A. At Cambridge, Milton had added seven years of 
study in the university to four }~ears of school training. He 
was not paled by study, but long retained the bloom of youth 
upon a very fair complexion. He was a little under middle 
height, slender, but erect, vigorous, and agile, with light brown 



328 '"MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

hair clustering about his fair and oval face, with dark gray e}~es. 
His voice is said to have been "delicate and tunable." His 
father, by this time retired from business, and living in the 
completely rural village of Horton, which is not far from 
Windsor Castle, had designed his eldest son for a career in 
the church; but Milton felt, he said afterwards, that "he who 
would take orders must subscribe himself slave and take an oath 
withal," and by that feeling the church was closed to him. His 
choice was to be God's minister, but as a poet. Such a choice 
produced from his father natural remonstrance. There is refer- 
ence to this in a Latin poem to his father, "Ad Patrem," 
written by Milton at the close of his univershrv training, full of 
love and gratitude for the education so far finished, with this 
glance at the kindly controvers3 T that was then between them. 
The translation is Cowper's : 

" Nor thou persist, I pray thee, still to slight 
The sacred Nine, and to imagine vain 
And useless powers, by whom inspired thyself 
Art skilful to associate verse with airs 
Harmonious, and to give the human voice 
A thousand modulations, heir by right 
Indisputable of Arion's fame. 
Now say, what wonder is it if a son 
Of thine delight in verse, if, so conjoin' d 
In close affinity, we sympathize 
In social arts, and kindred studies sweet ? 
Such distribution of himself to us 
Was Phoebus' choice ; thou hast thy gift, and I 
Mine also, and between us we receive, 
Father and son, the whole-inspiring God." 

Milton went home to Horton, and proceeded to add to the 
four 3 T ears of school training and the seven 3 T ears of university 
training another seven years of special training for his place 
among the poets. Nearly six years were spent at Horton, 
from the end of July, 1632, to April, 1638 ; then followed 
fifteen months of foreign travel. 

Milton's life as a writer is in three parts: — 1. The period 
of his Earlier Poems, in the time of Charles I., including 
"L' Allegro" and "II Penseroso," "Arcades," " Comus," 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON. 329 

"Lycidas." 2. The period of his Prose Works, from 1641 to 
the end of the Commonwealth. 3. The period of his Later 
Poems, in the time of Charles II. ; namely, "Paradise Lost," 
"Paradise Regained," and " Samson Agonistes." 

The most of Milton's minor poems were produced during 
this period of studious retirement at his father's house in the 
country, between the years 1632 and 1638 ; and this will be 
the most convenient place in which to speak of them. His 
Later Poems we shall defer till we come to stud} T his life in the 
Second Half of the Seventeenth Century. u L' Allegro " and 
" II Penseroso " are companion poems, representing two moods 
of one mind, and that mind Milton's. No man can be the 
one, in Milton's sense, who cannot also be the other. It was 
part of Milton's training for his work as a poet to stud} 7 thor- 
oughly the words through which he was to express his thought. 
Milton's precision in the use of words is very noticeable, and 
it fills his verse with subtile delicacies of thought and ex- 
pression. 

Mirth and Melancholy would not content Milton as titles for these 
poems, because one word has for its original meaning "softness," and 
is akin to marrow, the soft fat in bones; the other word, based on an 
old false theory of humors in a man, traces the grave mood to black bile. 
The poems themselves use the English words with definition of the 
sense in which alone each is accepted: 

" These delights if thou canst give, 
Mirth, with thee I mean to live." 

" These pleasures, Melancholy, give, 
And I with thee will choose to live." 

The Italian titles to the poems represented in each case the real source 
of these delights and pleasures. Milton's Mirth was the joy in all 
cheerful sights and sounds of nature, and in social converse natural to 
the man whose bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne; and "L' Allegro" 
is defined in Gherardini's "Supplimento a' Vocabolarj Italiani" as 
"one who has in his heart cause for contentment (che ha in cuore 
cagione di contentezza) , which shows itself in serenity of counte- 
nance." "II Penseroso," whose name is derived from a word meaning 
"to weigh," is the man grave, not through ill-humor, but while his 
reason is employed in weighing and considering that which invites his 
contemplation. With his companion sketches of this true lightness of 
heart and this true gravity, Milton blends a banning of the false mirth 
of the thoughtless — "vain deluding joys, the brood of Folly" — 
and the black dog, the loathed (from lath, meaning "evil") Melancholy 



MANUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 



"of Cerberus and blackest Midnight bom." To commendation of the 
true he thus joins condemnation of the false; and by transferring his 
condemnation of a baseless 303- to the opening of that poem which 
paints gravity of thoughtfulness, and his condemnation of a Stygian 
gloom to that poem. which paints innocent enjoyment, he heightens 
the effect of each poem by contrast, and links the two together more 
completely. The poems are exactly parallel in structure : 





L'ALLEGRO. 


LIXES. 




IL PEXSEROSO. 


UTNTS. 


1. 


Banning of " loathed " Melan- 
choly 


1-10 


1. 


Banning of " vain " Joys . 


1-10 


2. 


Invitation to "heart-easing" 




2. 


Invitation to "divinest" Melan- 






Mirth 


11-24 




choly ...... 


11-21 


3. 


Allegorical parentage and com- 




3. 


Allegorical parentage and com- 






panions 


25-40 




panions 


22-54 


4. 


The Morning Song 


41-56 


4. 


The Even-Song . 


55-64 


5. 


Ahroad under the Sun 


57-98 


0. 


Ahroad under the Moon 


65-76 


6. 


Xight, and the tales told hy the 




6. 


Xight, and lonely study of Na- 






social fireside . 


99-116 




ture's mysteries, and of the 
great stories of the Poets . 


77-120 


7. 


L Allegro social . 


117-134 


7. 


11 Penseroso solitary . 


121-154 


8. 


His Life set to Music . 


135-150 


8. 


His Life set to Music . 


155-174 



9. Acceptance of each mood — if this he it. 

" Arcades " is a slight piece, intended as the poetic portion 
of an entertainment presented, probably before 1634, to the 
Countess of D.erby, the wife of Lord Chancellor Egerton. at 
her country-seat of Harefield, a few miles off from Horton, 
where Milton then lived. 

There is no direct evidence that "Arcades" was written 
before " Comus ; " but it is likely that success in the small 
occasional masque caused Milton to be joined again with Henry 
Lawes, the musician, when a masque on a much larger scale 
was required by the same family for a state occasion. This 
was " Comus," which was first produced, on the 29th of Sep- 
tember, 1634, in the great hall of Ludlow Castle, where then 
resided the son-in-law of the Countess of Derby, the Earl of 
Bridgewater, who was then Lord-President of Wales. The 
sons and daughters of the earl took the principal parts in the 
masque, the incidents of which were drawn from a recent ad- 
venture of their own. Comus was a Greek personification of 
disordered pleasure, "tipsy dance and jollity:" and in the 
beautiful masque to which Milton gave that name, he was true 
to the highest sense of his vocation as a poet, while he satisfied 
all accidental demands on his skill. The masque must include 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTOX. 331 

music, — with a special song for Lacty Alice, — dances, and 
entertaining masquerade. The rout of Comus, disguised in 
heads of divers animals, provided masquerade in plenty. The 
masque must appeal to local feeling, and did that by bringing in 
Sabrina, the n3Tnph of the Severn ; must refer, also, with direct 
compliment, to the new Lord-President, and must provide fit 
parts for the three j-oungest children of the family, the Lady 
Alice, and her brothers John and Thomas, aged from nine to 
twelve. Ludlow Castle, the official residence of the Lord- 
President of Wales, had in former years been a seat of much 
wild revelry ; and something of this Milton may have known 
when he made his masque a poet's lesson against riot and ex- 
cess. The reverence due to 3-outh Milton maintained by caus- 
ing his children-actors to appear in no stage disguise, but 
simply as themselves. There was on the stage a mimic wood, 
through which the children passed on the way to their father 
and mother, who sat in front, and to whom, at the close of the 
masque, they were presented. As they traversed this wood of 
the world, typical adventures rose about them, and gave rise 
to dialogue, in which the part given to Lady Alice made the 
girl, still speaking in no person but her own, a type of holy 
innocence and purity. 

We now come to stud}' Milton's eleg^y, " Lj'cidas," which 
had its origin thus. On the 10th of August, 1637, the son of 
Sir John King, Secretary for Ireland, Edward King, a young 
man who was a fellow of Milton's own college at Cambridge, 
who was three or four 3'ears younger than Milton, and had been 
destined for the church, was drowned when on his way home 
for the long vacation. The ship in which he sailed from Chester 
for Dublin struck on a rock, in a calm sea, near the Welsh 
coast, and went down with all on board. When the next col- 
lege session began, a little book of memorial verse, in Latin, 
Greek, and English, was planned, and this appeared at the 
beginning of 1638, in two parts, each part having a separate 
title. It contained twenty-three pieces in Latin and Greek, 
and thirteen in English, of which thirteen the last was Milton's 
"Ljxidas," written in November, 1637. 

In "Comus" Milton had produced one of the masterpieces of our 



332 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1600 

literature, but lie felt only that the laurels he was born to gather were 
not yet ripe for his hand, and that when the death of Edward King 
called from him verse again, and love forced him to write, his hand 
could grasp but roughly at the bough not ready for his plucking: 

" Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more 
Ye myrtles brown with ivy never sere, 
I come to pluck your berries barsb and crude, 
And, with forced fingers rude, 
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year : 
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, 
Compels me to disturb your season due : 
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. 
Who would not sing for Lycidas? " 

The pastoral name of Lycidas was chosen to signify purity of charac- 
ter. In Theocritus a goat was so called {/ievncTag) for its whiteness. Like 
Spenser, Milton looked on the pastoral fomi as that most fit for a muse 
in its training time. Under the veil of pastoral allegory, therefore, he 
told the story of the shipwreck; but in two places his verse rose as into 
bold hills above the level of the plain, when thoughts of higher strain 
were to be uttered. The first rise (lines 64 to 84) was to meet the doubt 
that would come when a young man with a pure soul and high aspira- 
tion labored with self-denial throughout youth and early manhood to 
prepare himself for a true life in the world, and then at the close of the 
long preparation died. If this the end, why should the youth aspire? 

" VTere it not better done, as others use, 
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Nea?ra's hail- ? " 

(As in Virgil, Eel. viii., 11. 77, 78; and Horace, Od. in. xiv., 11. 21-24.) 
But, Milton replied, our aspiration is not bounded by this life : 

" Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
Nor in the glistering foil 
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies; 
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove : 
As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed." 

From that height of thought Milton skilfully descended again : 

" O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, 
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds! 
That strain I heard was of a higher mood : 
But now my oat proceeds ; " 

and we are again upon the flowery plain of the true pastoral, till pres- 
ently there is another sudden rise of thought (11. 108-131). The deal 
youth was destined for the church, of which he would have been a pure 
devoted servant. He is gone, and the voice of St. Peter, typical head of 



ToA.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON 833 

the church, speaks sternly of the many who remain, — false pastors who 
care only to shear their flocks, to scramble for church livings, and shove 
those away whom God has called to he his ministers. Ignorant of the 
duties of their sacred office, what care they ? They have secured their 
incomes, and preach, when they please, their unsubstantial, showy ser- 
mons, in which they are as shepherds piping, not from sound reeds, but 
from little shrunken straws. The congregations, hungry for the word of 
God, look up to the pulpits of these men with blind mouths, and are 
not fed. Swollen with windy doctrine, and the rank mist of words with- 
out instruction, they rot in their souls, an^d spread contagion, besides 
what the Devil, great enemy of the Christian sheepfold, daily devours 
apace, "and nothing said." Against that wolf no use is made of the 
sacred word that can subdue him, of " the sword of the Spirit, which is 
the word of God" (Ephes. vi. IT). "But that two-handed engine," — 
two-handed, because we lay hold of it by the Old Testament and the 

Ne \v, — 

" But that two-banded engine at the door 
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more." 

Milton wrote engine (contrivance of wisdom), and not weapon, because 
"the word of God, quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged 
sword " (Heb. iv. 12), when it has once smitten evil, smites no more, but 
heals and comforts. 

Here again, by a skilful transition, Milton descends to the level of his 
pastoral or Sicilian verse. The river of Arcady has shrunk within its 
banks at the dread voice of St. Peter, but now it flows again: 

" Return, Alpheus ; the dread voice is past 
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse, 
And call the vales, and hid them hither cast 
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues." 

The first lines of " Lvciclas " connected Milton's strain of 
love with his immediate past. Its last line glances on to his 
immediate future, — ""To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures 
new." 

At that time Milton was preparing to add to his course of 
education two years or more of travel in ItaPy and Greece. As 
a poet he did not count himself to have attained, but still 
pressed forward. In April, 1G38, he, attended by one man- 
servant, left Horton for his travel on the Continent. On his 
way through Paris, he met Hugo Grotius ; from Paris, he 
went to Nice, from Nice by sea to Genoa ; he visited Leghorn 
and Pisa, staid two months at Florence, then, by way of 
Siena, went to Rome. At Rome he remained two months, and 
while there enjo\ed and praised in three Latin epigrams the 



334 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

singing of the then famous vocalist, Leonora Baroni. From 
Rome, Milton, aged thirty, went to Naples, where he was kind- 
ly received by Manso, Marquis of Villa, then an old man of 
sevent} T -seven, the friend and biographer of Tasso. At his de- 
parture he paid his respect to Manso in a Latin poem addressed 
to him. Milton was about to pass on through Sicily to Greece, 
when, as he wrote afterwards in his " Second Defence of the 
People of England," "the melancholy intelligence which I re- 
ceived of the civil commotions in England made me alter my 
purpose ; for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement 
abroad while my fellow- citizens were fighting for liberty at 
home." He retraced his steps, dwelt on his way back another 
two months at Rome. At Florence, also, he again staid for 
two months ; he visited Lucca, Bologna, Ferrara ; gave a month 
to Venice ; from Venice he shipped to England the books he 
had bought in Italy ; then he went through Verona and Milan 
to Geneva, where he was in daily converse with Giovanni 
Diodati, uncle of his old school-friend. From Geneva, Milton 
passed through France, and was at home again in July or 
August, 1639, after an absence of about fifteen months. When 
he returned he found his friend Charles Diodati dead, and 
poured out his sorrow in a Latin pastoral, " Epitaphium Damo- 
nis," with the refrain, as Cowper translates it: 

" Go seek your home, my lambs; my thoughts are due 
To other cares than those of feeding you." 

The flocks, the dappled deer, the fishes, and the birds can find 
the fit companion in every place : 

" We only, an obdurate kind, rejoice, 
Scorning all others, in a single choice ; 
We scarce in thousands meet one kindred mind, 
And if the long sought good at last we find, 
When least we fear it, Death our treasure steals, 
And gives our heart a wound that nothing heals. 
Go, go, my lambs, unpastur'd as ye are, 
My thoughts are all now due to other care. 
Ah, what delusion lur'd me from my flocks, 
To traverse Alpine snows, and rugged rocks ? 
What need so great had I to visit Rome, 
Now sunk in ruins, and herself a tomb ? 



To A. D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON. 335 

Or, had she flourish' d still as when, of old, 

For her sake Tityrus forsook his fold, 

What need so great had 1 1' incur a pause 

Of thy sweet intercourse for such a cause ; 

For such a cause to place the roaring sea, 

Eocks, mountains, woods, between my friend and me ? 

Else had I grasp'd thy feeble hand, compos'd 

Thy decent limbs, thy drooping eyelids clos'd, 

And, at the last, had said — ' Farewell — ascend — 

Nor even in the skies forget thy friend.' " 

Into Charles Dioclati's ear Milton had whispered his dream 
of immortality, said that his Muse rose yet only on tender 
wings, unequal to the meditated flight. In his poem to Manso, 
Milton indicated that it was in his mind to write a poem of high 
strain upon King Arthur. A passage in this ' ' Epitaph of 
Damon ' ' shows that when he came back to England the design 
to write an epic upon Arthur took a more definite shape. Had 
he taken Arthur for his hero, Milton would, like Spenser, have 
turned him to high spiritual use. He had looked for examples, 
he said afterwards, to Homer, Virgil, Tasso, to the plays of 
Sophocles and Euripides, to the odes of Pindar, to the poetical 
books of the Old and New Testament, as " the mind at home 
in the spacious circuit of her musing ' ' sought to plan its future 
work. He had reasoned to himself whether in the writing of 
an epic poem " the rules of Aristotle herein are to be strictly 
kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art] 
and use judgment is no transgression, but an enriching of art." 
But still, and for years yet to come, Milton felt that the work to 
which his soul 3'earned forward was to be achieved 01% " by 
devout prayer to that eternal Spirit w r ho can enrich with all 
utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim, with the 
hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom 
He pleases : to this must be added industrious and select read- 
ing, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous 
arts and affairs." He knew that only hard work could enable 
him to make the best use of his genius, hard work and a right 
life. In the " Apology for Smectymnuus " Milton has written, 
" I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be 
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 
ought himself to be a true poem." 



336 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600. 

The news that caused Milton to turn back from his longer 
travel into Greece was news of trouble with the Scots which 
clearly boded the civil war that soon came on, and that contin- 
ued to occupy all Englishmen for many years. Soon after his 
return to England, John Milton settled in London, by taking 
lodgings for a short time at the house of a tailor in St. Bride's 
Churchyard, and there he undertook the teaching of his sister 
Anne's two boys, Edward and John Phillips, aged nine and 
eight. While teaching his nephews, Milton, in 1640, was 
sketching plans of sacred dramas, dwelling especially upon 
" Paradise Lost " as the subject of a drama; suggesting also 
as themes, " Abrain from Morea ; or, Isaac redeemed," " The 
Deluge," "Sodom," "Baptistes," noting subjects also from 
British histor}-. Milton " made no long sta}-," his nephew 
tells us, in his lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard: " necessity 
of having a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit 
for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to 
take one ; and, accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took, in 
Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the 
fitter for his turn, besides that there are few streets in London 
more free from noise than that." There he worked hard, and 
had his two nephews to board with him. There also he began, 
in 1641, the second part of his literary life ; put aside, at the 
age of thirt}-two, his high ambition as a poet ; and, devoting 
himself to the duty that lay nearest to his hand, gave the best 
3 r ears of his manhood, the twentjr years from thirty-two to fift} T - 
two, to those questions of his day that touched, as he thought, 
the essentials of English liberty. 



CHAPTER VI. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 

SCHOLARS, HISTORIANS, AND MEN OF 

SCIENCE. 

1. Learned Men; Janres I. — 2. Cotton and Bodley. — 3. Robert Burton. — 4. Lance- 
lot Andrewes. — 5. James Usher. — 6. John Selden. — 7. Sir Henry Wotton ; 
John Hales.— 8. John Lightfoot. — 9. Sir Henry Spelman. — 10. John Hay- 
ward.— 11. William Camden. — 12. Historians; John Speed. — 13. Samuel 
Purchas. — 14. Sir Walter Raleigh. — 15. Richard Knolles ; Alexander Ross.— 
16. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. — 17. Spottiswoode ; Calderwood. — 18. Thomas 
Fuller. — 19.,, Men of Science; Francis Bacon. — 20. John Napier; William 
Harvey. — 21. John Wilkins. — 22. Samuel Hartlib. — 23. John Wallis. 

1. The First Half of the Seventeenth Century was an age of 
learned men in England ; and at the head of them, it may be 
appropriate to mention King James I. He had received in 
earty life the best possible instruction from Buchanan and 
others. He was a clumsy boy, with ungainliness produced b}^ 
plrvsical defect, a tongue too large for his mouth, and a mind 
in which all depths that there could ever be must be made arti- 
ficially. Good workmen dug and shaped ; the bo} r was good- 
tempered, picked up some shrewdness, lived a creditable life, 
had respect for knowledge, and good appetite for it, though bad 
digestion. He had a pleasant type of it before him in cheery, 
impressible George Buchanan ; a Presbyterian, austere but half 
wa} r through, with a face like a Scotch Socrates, although more 
apt than Socrates to take offence, familiar with Latin as with his 
native tongue, full of anecdote and good talk, familiar also with 
languages and people round about, and liking Scotland all the 
better for experience in other lands. But for James the hori- 
zon did not widen as he climbed the hill of knowledge, his 
heart did not swell as he rose to higher sense of harmony and 
beauty ; he hammered at the big lumps about him, and was 
proud of being so far up. In 1585, when his age was but nine- 

337 



888 MANUAL OF. ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

teen, he published at Edinburgh " The Essayes of a Prentise 
in the Divine Art of Poesie." In preliminaiy sonnets of com- 
phment, the Muses, through various courtly representations, 
sought to 

" Tell how he doeth in tender yearis essay 
Above his age with skill our arts to blaise, 
Tell how he doeth with gratitude repay 

The crowne lie wan for his deserved praise. 
Tell how of Jove, of Mars, but more of God 
The glorie and grace he hath proclaimed abrod." 

The " Essa} T es " opened with twelve sonnets of invocation to 
the gods, namely, Jove, Apollo, each of the four Seasons, Nep- 
tune, Tritons and their kind, Pluto, Mars, Mercuiy, and finally, 
for the twelfth sonnet : 

" In short, you all f orenamed gods I pray 

For to concur with one accord and will 
That all my works may perfyte be alway ; 

Which if ye doe, then swear I for to fill 
My works immortall with your praises still ; 

I shall your names eternall ever sing, 
I shall tread downe the grasse on Parnass hill 

By making with your names the world to ring ; 
I shall your names from all oblivion bring; 
I lofty Virgill shall to life restoir." 

After these twelve sonnets of invocation, the king placed a 
translation of "The Heavenly Muse" of Du Bartas ; then a 
dim allegory, in Chaucer's stanza, " Ane Metaphoricall Inven- 
tion of a Tragedie called Phoenix," with a preface of eighteen 
bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse, in the form of a loz- 
enge upon a little pedestal, then as a compound acrostic. Then 
followed a short bit of translation out of the fifth book of 
Lucan ; and then, lastly, "Ane Schort Treatise, containing 
some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis 
Poesie." In 1591, was published "His Majesties Poeticall 
Exercises at Vacant Houres ; " and in 1616, appeared a col- 
lected edition, in folio, of his prose-writings, consisting of theo- 
logical and metaplrysical discussions, and containing his most 
famous production, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco." 

2. Robert Bruce Cotton, born at Denton, Huntingdonshire, in 1570, 
and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, was knighted by James I. 



To A.D. 1650.] LANCELOT ANDREWES. 339 

In 1611, when his Majesty had invented the rank of baronet, and began 
to trade in the new article, Sir Robert Cotton became one of his first 
customers. King James was aided in his controversies by Sir Eobert 
Cotton's learning; and the treasures of literature rescued by him from 
the scattered waste of the monasteries, were at the service of all who 
could make good use of them. It was in the reign of James I., that an 
older man, Sir Thomas Bodley, founded the Bodleian Library at Ox- 
ford. He was born at Exeter, in 1544, the son of that John Bodley who, 
in exile at Geneva, had been a chief promoter of the translation known 
as the Geneva Bible. Thomas Bodley had come to England at Eliza- 
beth's accession, entered at Magdalene College, Oxford, became fellow 
of Morton, had been employed by the queen on embassies, was for nine 
years ambassador at the Hague ; but in 1597 he retired from public life, 
and made it the work of his last years to give to the University of Oxford 
a library in place of that which it had lost. In 1602 he refitted the dis- 
mantled room which had been used for the library founded by Hum- 
phrey Duke of Gloucester, and furnished it with ten thousand pounds' 
worth of books. In July, 1610, he laid the foundation-stone of a new 
library building; and died in 1612, about a year before the building was 
completed. 

3. Robert Burton became a clergyman, and had the livings 
of St. Thomas, Oxford, and Segrave, in Leicestershire ; but he 
lived a quiet scholar's life at his college, Christ Church, Oxford ; 
and in 1621, he published "The Anatonry of Melancholy, by 
Democritus Junior." This discussion of all forms of melan- 
choly, and their remedies, is very quaint and ingenious in thought 
and expression, and so crammed with pleasant erudite quotations 
that the book has been to many later writers, who desired to 
affect knowledge of books the}' had never seen, the storehouse 
of their second-hand learning. Although an original book, its 
manner was in the fashion of the time ; and it is said to have 
made the fortune of its Oxford publisher. It went through five 
editions before its author's death, in 1640. 

4. Lancelot Andrewes was, in knowledge of church his- 
tory and of patristic writings, the most learned churchman of 
the days of James I. He was born in London, in 1555, edu- 
cated at Merchant-Tailors' School, sent for his abilnVy to 
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (Spenser's College), obtained a 
fellowship, studied and taught divinity with great success, and 
was consulted as a profound casuist. Henry, Earl of Hunting- 
don, took him to the North of England ; and there he persuaded 



SAO MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

some Roman Catholics to change their faith. Sir Francis Wal- 
singham gave him the parsonage of Alton, in Hampshire, and 
he was then successively vicar of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, Preb- 
endaiy of St. Paul's — where he read divinity lectures three 
times a week in term time — Master of Pembroke Hall, Chap- 
lain in Ordinary to Elizabeth, and Dean of Westminster. The 
queen would not raise him higher, because his ecclesiastical 
view of the rights of bishops forbade him to alienate episcopal 
revenues. James I. delighted in his preaching, which was that 
of a religious man strongly tinged with the pedantry of the 
time, and made him, in 1605, Bishop of Chichester. He was 
promoted afterwards through the bishopric of Ely to that of 
Winchester, in 1618, and he died in 1626, aged seventy-one. 
" Mnety-six Sermons " of his were published by command of 
Charles I., in 1631. 

5. James Usher, twenty-five years 3 T ounger than Bishop 
Andre wes, succeeded to his repute as a theologian, and ex- 
celled him in learning. Usher was born at Dublin, in 1580, 
son to one of the six clerks in chancery. He was taught to 
read by two aunts, who had been blind from their cradle, but 
who knew much of the Bible \)j heart. TrinhVy College, Dub- 
lin, owes its existence to a grant made b} T Queen Elizabeth, in 
1591, of the Augustine monaster}' of All Saints. The first 
stone was laid on New-Year's Day, 1593. It began work in 
the same j'ear, and James Usher was one of the first three 
students admitted. He had delight in history, made chrono- 
logical tables as a bo} T , and, as a 3-outh, when the church con- 
troversies became interesting to him, he resolved to read for 
himself the whole works of the Fathers whose authority was so 
continually cited. He began at the age of twenty, and, reading 
a portion daily, finished at the age of thiily-eight. His father 
died when Usher was about to be sent to London to study 
law. He then abandoned to his brothers and sisters his pater- 
nal inheritance, reserving only enough for his own support at 
college in a life of stucty, obtained a fellowship, at the age of 
twentj'-one took holy orders, argued and preached against the 
Catholics, and opposed toleration of them. At the accession of 
James I. James Usher was twent3--three years old. He came 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN SELDEN. 341 

to London to biry books for the libraiy of the new college at 
Dublin, and found Sir Thomas Bodley buying books for Oxford. 
While he was in London Usher's mother became Roman Catho- 
lic, and all his controversial skill failed afterwards to reconvert 
her. In 1606, and afterwards at regular intervals of three 
years, Usher was again book-bivying in England. In 1607, he 
was made Professor of Divinity at Dublin, and Chancellor of 
St. Patrick's Cathedral. In 1612 he became Doctor of Divin- 
ity. In 1613, he published in London, and dedicated to King 
James, his first book, in Latin, continuing from the sixth cen- 
tuiy the argument of Jewel's Apolog}-, to prove that the tenets 
of the Protestants were those of the primitive Christians. In 
the same year Usher married the well-dowered daughter of his 
old friend and associate in book-buying, Luke Chaloner. In 
1619, he was raised to the bishopric of Meath. As bishop, 
Usher was still active against Catholicism, and he published, 
in English, in 1622, "A Discourse on the Religion Anciently 
Professed by the Irish and British," to show that Protestant 
opinions were those of the ancient faith, and point out how 
at successive times the practices of the Church of Rome had 
been introduced. This work caused King James to command 
that Bishop Usher should produce a larger work, in Latin, 
on the antiquities of the British Church, with leave of ab- 
sence from his diocese for consul^ of ion of authorities. He 
was a year in England, returned to Ireland in 1624, and, in 
reply to William Malone, published an "Answer to a Chal- 
lenge of a Jesuit in Ireland" to disprove uniformity of doc- 
trine in the Roman Catholic Church ; thus giving more evidence 
of his knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities. He then re- 
turned to England ; and as the Archbishop of Armagh died 
at that time, King James, in the last j T ear of his reign, gave 
the archbishopric to Usher. He lived through all the tumult 
of Charles I.'s reign, and died in 1656. His published writings 
are veiy numerous. 

6. John Sel£en was born in December, 1584, at Salvington, 
about two miles from Worthing, in Sussex. His father was a 
musician, who sent him to the free school at Chichester, whence 
he was sent by the master's advice to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 



342 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

1602 he became a member of Clifford's Inn; and a year after 
the accession of King James, being then aged nineteen, he re- 
moved to the Inner Temple. John Selden had a strong bod} r , 
able to sustain incessant studies ; he had also a wonderful mem- 
ory. He practised little at the bar, but was consulted for his 
knowledge ; gathered many books, inquired through them freely, 
and wrote on the front leaf of most of them, as his motto, in a 
Greek sentence, " Above all, Liberty." He very soon became 
solicitor and steward to the Earl of Kent, and found also a good 
friend in Sir Robert Cotton, to whom he dedicated his first book, 
finished in 1607, but not published till 1615, the " Analecton 
Anglo-Britannicon Libri Duo," two books of collections, giving 
a summary chronological view of English records down to the 
Norman Invasion. In 1610, besides two little treatises, one 
Latin and one English, on the antiquities of English law, he set 
forth some results of his reading in a short piece on " The 
Duello, or Single Combat," extra-judicial and judicial, but 
chiefly judicial, with its customs since the Conquest. In 1614, 
Selden produced his largest English work, " Titles of Honour," 
a full study of the history of the degrees of nobility and gentry, 
derived from all ages and countries, but applied especially to 
England. In 1617 appeared, in Latin, Selden's treatise on the 
gods of Syria — " De Diis Syris " — a learned inquiry into poly- 
theism, mainly with reference to that of Syria, for special stud}' 
of the false gods named in the Old Testament. This book and 
the " Titles of Honour " had raised and extended beyond Eng- 
land Selden's character for learning, when, in 1618, his way of 
research crossed dangerous ground, for he then highly offended 
James I. by publishing ' l The Histo^ of Tithes." The church- 
men who dwelt most upon obedience to authority, whom, there- 
fore, the king preferred, had upheld a divine right of tithes, in- 
herited by the Christian from the Jewish priesthood. Selden's 
book was not written, he said, to prove a case on either side ; 
it was not " any thing else but itself, that is, a mere narrative, 
and the history of tithes." But in his dedication of it to Sir 
Robert Cotton he had rightly said that stud}- of the past is to 
be cherished only for its fruitful and precious part, " which gives 
necessary light to the present ; " and condemned " the too stu- 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN SELDEN. 343 

dious affectation of bare and sterile antiquity, which is nothing 
else than to be exceeding bus} T about nothing." When, there- 
fore, it appeared that Selden had carefully marshalled and veri- 
fied authorities on both sides, and that, although he himself 
gave no opinion, his facts against the theory of a divine right 
of tithes outweighed his facts in favor of it, there was outcry, 
and his Majesty had argument with Mr. Selden, who was in- 
troduced to him by two friends, one of them Ben Jonson. 
Selden was called also before the High Commission Court, who 
compelled him to a declaration in which he did not recant any 
thing, but was sorry he spoke. He admitted error in having 
published "The History of Tithes," in having given "occa- 
sion of argument against an}' right of maintenance, jure divino, 
of the ministers of the gospel," and expressed grief at having 
incurred their lordships' displeasure. Seidell's book was pro- 
hibited ; all men were free to write against it. Richard Moun- 
tagu, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, was encouraged by the 
king to confute Selden, to whom his Majesty said, " If } t ou or 
any of your friends shall write against this confutation I will 
throw you into prison." Dr. Mountagu had it all his own way 
when, in 1621, he issued his " Diatribe upon the First Part of 
the late Histoiy of Tithes." Selden confined himself to pri- 
vate comments, and sent to Edward Herbert, afterwards Lord 
Herbert of Cherbuiy, some notes on the work of one of his an- 
tagonists. He sought also to appease his Majesty by giving 
him three tracts, to make amends for his inadvertent rudenesses. 
1. His Majesty concerned himself about the number of the 
Beast, and Selden had spoken slightingly of the attempts to 
calculate it. In one of the three tracts he now restricted his 
censure, and spoke respectfully of a most acute deduction of 
his Majesty's. 2. Selden had spoken of Calvin's confession 
that he could not interpret the Book of Revelation as ' ' equally 
judicious and modest." But King James was a confident inter- 
preter, and was not he also judicious and modest? Selden ex- 
plained that all men had not ignorance to confess, and that 
King James's explanations were " the clearest sun among the 
lesser lights." 3. Selden had referred in his "History of 
Tithes ' ' to the want of evidence that Christmas Da}' was a true 



344 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

anniversary. " This," said King James, " countenances Puri- 
tan objection to our way of keeping Christmas." To please 
the king, Selclen in his third tract produced evidence to support 
the date of the anniversary. In December, 1621, he joined in 
a protest of the House of Commons, claiming libeily of speech, 
and counselling James I. upon his duties as the king of a free 
people, and for that offence to the king he suffered slight im- 
prisonment. It was at the close of James's reign, in 1624, that 
John Selden first entered Parliament, as member for Lancaster. 
In the Parliament of Charles I. he was opposed to arbitrary 
government, he supported liberty of the press, and was sent to 
the Tower for a time by Charles as well as by James. But Sel- 
den had the moderation of a scholar, and the regard for old 
institutions that is strengthened by a study of the past ; while, 
true to his love of liberty, he sought conciliation, and was 
somewhat suspected by more angry combatants. Usher had 
been nominated as a member of the Westminster Assembly, but 
refused to attend, and preached against it at Oxford. On this 
account it was resolved to confiscate his library, but Selden 
saved it for him. Selden himself went to the Assembly, and 
foiled bitter divines at their own weapons. " Sometimes," saj-s 
his friend Whitelocke, " when they had cited a text of Scripture 
to prove their assertion, he would tell them, ' Perhaps in your 
little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves,' which they would often pull 
out and read, ' the translation ma} T be thus, but the Greek or 
Hebrew signifies thus and thus,' and so would silence them." 
When, in September, 1645, the House of Commons was debating 
the proposal to bring in excommunication and suspension from 
the Sacrament as part of the discipline in the new establishment 
of religion, Selden marshalled his learning into array against it. 
The most interesting books of his that appeared in the reign of 
Charles I. were his account of the marbles brought from the East 
to the house of the Earl of Arundel, a great patron of art and lit- 
erature — the " Marmora Arundelliana," published in 1628 and 
1629 ; and the " Mare Clausula " (" Closed Sea"), published 
in 1635, but written in the reign of James I. Grotius, in his 
" Mare Liberum " ( u Free Sea "), having contended that the 
sea was free to the Dutch in the East Indies, where Portugal 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN HALES. 345 

laid claim to rights in it, Selden argued that the sea round Eng- 
land belonged to the English. The book was not printed in 
James's reign; but in 1634 disputes arose out of the claim of 
Dutch fishermen to the right of free sea for the herring-fishery 
by English coasts. Seidell's " Mare Clausum " was then pub- 
lished, with its purport set forth in its title-page : " The Closed 
Sea ; or, On the Dominion of the Sea. Two books. In the 
first, it is demonstrated that the sea, from the law of nature and 
of nations, is not common to all men, but is the subject of prop- 
erty equally with the land. In the second, the King of Great 
Britain is asserted to be lord of the circumfluent sea, as an in- 
separable and perpetual appendage of the British Empire." In 
1640, Selden published an elaborate work on the natural and 
national law of the Jews — " De Jure Naturali et Gentium jux- 
ta Disciplinam Ebraeorum ; " and he added to this, in 1646, 
u Uxor Ebraica," which was a work upon the Jewish laws of 
marriage and divorce. ' During the civil war, he acted a timid 
part. On the execution of Charles I., Selden withdrew into 
retirement ; and in 1654, he died at the house of the Countess 
of Kent, to whom, it is supposed, he was secret!}* married. His 
private secretar}* published a little book containing memoranda 
of Selden' s conversations, called " Table-Talk." 

7. Sir Henry Wotton, who had been Provost of Eton since 1624, 
and who had written a most cordial letter to his young neighbor, John 
Milton, before he left for Italy, died, in 1639, at the age of seventy-one. 
He had been, as a young man, secretary to the Earl of Essex, had then 
lived in Florence, and served the Grand Duke of Tuscany as a diploma- 
tist. Being sent as ambassador to James VI. of Scotland, Wotton 
pleased that monarch so well that he was employed by him, when King 
of England, as his ambassador to Venice, and to princes of Germany. 
He was made Provost of Eton at the close of James's reign; and in the 
same year, 1624, he published his " Elements of Architecture." Wotton 
wrote also on the State of Christendom, a Survey of Education, Poems, 
and other pieces, collected and published in 1651, by Izaak Walton, as 
"Reliquiae Wottonianse; or, a Collection of Lives, Letters, Poems, with 
Characters of Sundry Personages, and other Incomparable Pieces of Lan- 
guage and Art. By Sir H. Wotton, Knt." 

During the last months of Wotton' s life at Eton, the old provost was 
much comforted by the society of John Hales (born in 1584), who had 
been made Greek professor at Oxford in 1612, and who had then an Eton 
fellowship. He died in 1656, and his writings were published in 1659, as 



346 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

" Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eton Col- 
lege." The most interesting part is the series of letters written by Hales 
from the Synod of Dort. Having gone to the Hague, in 1616, as chap- 
lain to the English ambassador, Sir Dudley Carleton, Hales went to the 
Synod of Dort, where his sympathies were with the Arminians ; and in 
letters and documents sent to Sir Dudley Carleton, he has left an inter- 
esting narrative of the proceedings of the synod. 

8. Oriental scholarship was represented by John Lightf oot, born at 
Stoke-on-Trent, in 1602, who had been of Milton's college, at Cambridge, 
then was tutor at Eepton School, then held a curacy in Shropshire, and 
became chaplain to Sir Eowland Cotton, a great student of Hebrew. This 
gave Lightfoot his impulse to a study of the Oriental languages, and in 
1629 he published his "Erubhim; or, Miscellanies, Christian and Judai- 
cal," dedicated to Sir Rowland, who gave him, the next year, the 
rectory of Ashley. Staffordshire. 

9. Sir Henry Spelman, who died in 1641 at the age of seventy-nine, 
had been employed and knighted by James I. He was an orthodox anti- 
quary, who had written in behalf of tithes when John Selden got into 
trouble for his account of them, and left behind him a valuable archaeo- 
logical glossary, and a collection in two folios, the first published in 
1639, the second after his death, of British Ecclesiastical Laws, "Con- 
cilia, Decreta, Leges, Constitutiones in Re Ecclesiastica Orbis Britan- 
nici." He had a son, Sir John Spelman, who inherited his tastes, wrote 
a life of King Alfred, and survived his father but two years. In 1640, 
Sir Henry Spelman founded a lectureship at Cambridge for the study 
of Anglo-Saxon or First English. Archbishop Usher, at his suggestion, 
nominated Abraham Whelock, a learned Orientalist, who was already 
teaching Arabic there. Sir Henry Spelman set apart a portion of his 
private income and the vicarage of Middleton, as a stipend either for 
the reading of Anglo-Saxon lectures, or the publishing of Anglo-Saxon 
manuscripts. Whelock preferred private study. He edited Bede's His- 
tory, and gave much of his time to the printing of the Gospels in 
Persian, to be used for missionary enterprise. 

10. John Hayward — who became Sir John under James I. — pub- 
lished, in 1599, the first of his historical biographies, as the "First Part 
of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie TV. Extending to the end of the 
first yeare of his raigne." It was dedicated, with high admiration, to 
the Earl of Essex, at a time when the earl's dealing with the question 
of King James's succession was bringing his head into peril; and it con- 
tained a passage on hereditary right in matters of succession that caused 
Elizabeth to imprison the author, and bid Francis Bacon search the 
book for any treasonous matter to be found in it. Narratives and stage 
presentations of the deposition of Richard II. were at this time supposed 
to have political significance. Bacon's report was a good-natured joke; 
he found no treason, but much larceny from Tacitus. He published, in 
1613, Lives of William L, William II., and Henry L; and in 1630, was 



To A.D- 1630.] WILLIAM CAMDEN. 347 

published posthumously his "Life of Edward VI." Other works of his 
are treatises on English constitutional law, on the church, and on prac- 
tical religion. He died in 1627. 

11. William Camden was a Londoner, born in 1551. 
He was educated at Christ's Hospital and St. Paul's School, 
entered as a servitor at Magdalene College, Oxford, whence 
he removed to Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), and 
then to Christ church. He graduated in 1573, and in 1575 be- 
came second master at Westminster School, where he spent all 
leisure in the studies by which he served his countiy in the 
latter part of Elizabeth's reign, and in the reign of her suc- 
cessor. He published, in 1586, the first edition of his "Bri- 
tannia," a work afterwards much expanded; and succeeded 
Dr. Edward Grant as head master in 1593. Before 1597 he 
published for the use of Westminster bo}*s a " Greek Gram- 
mar," which in course of time went through a hundred 
editions. In the same year he left the school on being 
appointed Clarencieux King- at- Arms. Camden w r as widely 
famed for learning, and his purity of life and modest kind- 
liness surrounded him with friends. In 1615, was published 
the first part, and, in 1627, the second part, of his " Annales 
Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elizabetha," in 
which, apart from their direct value as record, there is the 
charm also of an unaffected method. An English translation, 
as " The Historie of the Life and Reigne of the most re- 
nowned and victorious Princesse Elizabeth, late Queen of 
England. . . . Composed by way of Annales b} r the most 
learned Mr. William Camden," was published 1630. The 
work had been suggested to Camden, the most fit man living, 
by Lord Burghley, who, sa}-s the annalist, " set open unto me 
first his own and then the queen's roils, memorials, records, 
and thereout willed me to compile in a historical style the first 
beginnings of the reign of Queen Elizabeth." He studied 
carefully to carry out this design, procured access to charters, 
letters-patent, letters, notes of consultations in the council 
chamber, instructions to ambassadors ; looked through parlia- 
mentary diaries, acts, and statutes, and read over every edict 
or proclamation ; for the greatest part of all which he was 



348 MANUAL OM ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

beholden, lie said, to v i: Robert C >tton, " who hath with great 
cost and successful industry furnished himself with most choice 

store of matter of history and antiquity ; for from his light he 
hath willingly given great light unto me. Camden chose to 
take, for clearness and simplicity, the form of Annals for his 
work ; but endeavored so to tell his facts that their relation to 
each other might be understood, for he liked, he said, that 
ing of Polybius : ■• Take from histc: . why, how. and to what 
end, and what hath been done, and whether the thing done 
hath succeeded according to reason, and whatsoever is else will 
rather be an idle sport than a profitable instruction : and for 
the present it may delight, but for the fotui : if annot profit." 
Camden died in 1623. 

12. The development of England at a time when men felt 
: hey were living history, and the lively controversy upon ques- 
tions in which author::" of (he past was being constantly 
appealed to, gave great impulse to historical research. John 
Stow was followed by another patriotic tailor chronicle: . John 
Speed, born about 1550, at Farrington, in Cheshire, who, with 
little education, became : iithusiastie in the study of the anti- 

: - ;:' Ms own country. In 1608 and 1610 he published 
fifty-four maps of England and Wales. In 1611 he published, 
in royal folio, his Chronicle, as 4i The History of Great Brit- 
aine under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and 
Normans." I:: loll appeared, in folio, his "Theatre of the 
Empire of Great Britaine ; " and in 1616 the religious side of 
his English .'. tai actei was shown by the publication of *"A 
Cloud of Witnesses ; and they the Holy Genealogies of the 
Sacred Scriptures, confirming unto us the truth of the histories 
in God's most holy Word." Speed married when young, ha I 
eighteen children, and passed his golden wedding-day, his wife 
dying in 1628, and he in 1629. 

13. English regard for the Elizabethan voyagers was maintained in 
this reign by the Rev. Samuel Pure has, vicar of Eastwood, in Essex. 
The Rev. Richard Haklnyt's manuscripts came into his hands, and he 
resigne his : 3 rage to his brother, to devote himself to a continuation 
of the work of Hakluyt, His first volume appeared in folio in 1613, and 
it was continued with four volumes in 1625, as " Hakluytus Posthumus; 
or. Puiehas fa - Pilerimea," 



To A.D. 1650.] WALTER RALEIGH. 349 

14. Walter Raleigh was born in 1552, at the manor- 
house of Ha}-es Barton, about a mile from Buclleigh, in 
Devonshire. In 1566 he was sent to Oriel College, Oxford, 
where he remained three 3-ears ; and at the age of seventeen 
he left college without a degree to join as a volunteer the 
Protestants in France, where he shared the defeats of the 
Huguenots at Jarnac and Moncontour, shared their suc- 
cesses of 1570, had interest in the treaty of August, 1570, 
which conceded much to the reformers, and which was protested 
against by Pius V. and Philip II. Afterwards, he served in 
the Netherlands ; then went with his half-brother, Sir Humphre}' 
Gilbert, on a vo}'age to America, which proved unfortunate ; 
and in 1580, went with Lord Grey and Edmund Spenser to 
Ireland, where he made himself prominent hy his boldness and 
vigor. He then engaged actively in adventures of colonization, 
and especially of privateering, and by the latter he grew rich. 
One of Raleigh's privateers took a Spanish ship in the Azores 
with great treasure of gold, jewels, and merchandise. Two 
barks of his in the Azores made more prizes than the}' were 
able to bring home. Raleigh was in favor, too, at court; 
knighted (1585) ; enriched with twelve thousand acres of for- 
feited land in Ireland (1586) ; with a lucrative license for the 
sale of wines ; with the profits on over-lengths of cloth, alone 
worth more than four thousand pounds a 3'ear. He was made 
Captain of the Guard, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Lord 
"Warden of the Stannaries, and Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall. 
Money was sunk in the attempts to colonize Virginia, but it 
was only a part of the money made by Spanish prizes. Another 
expedition to Virginia was sent out by Raleigh in 1587 ; it was 
unsuccessful, and in March, 1589, Raleigh transferred his 
patent to a company of merchants. In 1588, Raleigh was at 
work with all his might upon the raising of a fleet to resist 
Spanish invasion. Elizabeth was excommunicated b} T Pope 
Sixtus V. Crusade was preached against England ; the Ar- 
mada came. On board one of its ships was Cervantes. On 
Sunday, the 24th of November, 1588, Queen Elizabeth went in 
state to St. Paul's, to return thanks for the defeat of the Ar- 
mada. Shakespeare, with his career before him, was at work 



350 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

in London in those days, with his great successes all to come, 
but sharing the deep feelings that bred noble thought in the 
Elizabethan time. In 1589, Raleigh and the Earl of Essex 
were volunteers in the expedition of Drake and Norris to Portu- 
gal, which came home with much booty. Then the " Shepherd 
of the Ocean " went to Ireland, and came back with his friend 
Spenser to court, after planting about his own house at Youghal 
the first potatoes in Ireland, with roots brought from Virginia. 
In the spring of 1591. an expedition was sent out under Lord 
Thomas Howard and Raleigh's cousin. Sir Richard Grenville, 
to intercept the fleet which annually brought to Spain its treas- 
ure from the East. The English cruised about the Azores, 
where the Spanish fleets from the East and the West Indies 
came together. The Spanish fleet was found to be too strong, 
and Lord Thomas Howard ordered his ships to keep together, 
and avoid attack : but Sir Richard Grenville. in the " Re- 
venge." believing that others would follow, boldly dashed into 
the enemy's armada, where he was left unaided, and fought 
desperately for fifteen hours with fifteen great ships out of a 
fleet of fifty-five, sinking two. and doing great damage to others. 
When the •• Revenge" must needs be lost, and Grenville him- 
self was wounded in the brain, he ordered his surviving men 
to blow up the vessel. But the " Revenge " was surrendered, 
Grenvilie's wounds were dressed by the Spanish surgeons, the 
Spaniards who stood by marvelling at his stout heart. As 
death drew near he said to them, in Spanish: --Here die I, 
Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have 
ended my life as a true soldier ought to do that hath fought for 
his country, queen, religion, and honor : whereby my soul most 
joyful departeth out of this body, and shall always leave behind 
it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath 
done his duty, as he was bound to do." "A Report of the 
Truth of the Eight about the lies of Azores this last Sommer 
Betwixt the ' Revenge.' one of her Majesties Shippes, and an 
Armada of the King of Spaine." was published by Raleigh in 
November, 1591. 

Raleigh then had Sherborne Castle given to him, but was 
soon afterwards in the Tower, under her Majesty's displeasure. 



To A.D. 1650.] WALTER RALEIGH. 351 

for an amour with Elizabeth Throgmorton, a maid of honor, 
whom he married after his release. He was in the Parliament 
of 1593, when a bill was brought in for suppression of the 
Brownists — a sect opposed to prelacy, and claiming equality 
and independence of all congregations. "Root them out," 
said Raleigh, "by all means; but there are twenty thousand 
of them, and if the men are put to death or banished, who is 
to maintain the wives and children?" Raleigh next planned 
an expedition to Guiana, tempted b}' the fables about El Dorado 
(the Gilded One, priest or king smeared with oil and covered 
with gold dust, an ideal god of wealth, lord of a cit} T fabu- 
lously rich), and sailed with a little expedition in February, 
1595, attacked the Spaniards in Trinidad, and destined the 
new city of San Jose. He then went up the Orinoco, picked 
up a legend of Amazons, which gave its European name to a 
great river, and, when the rains set in, came home, bringing a 
young cacique with him. Raleigh reached England about the 
end of Jul}', 1595, lived in London in great state, and pub- 
lished, in 1596, "The Discoverie of the Empyre of Guiana, 
with a Relation of the Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards 
call El Dorado), and of the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, 
Amapaia, etc. Performed in the year 1595." In 1596, he 
was with Essex in the expedition against Cadiz. On the 
accession of James I., his good fortune was at an end. In 
November, 1603, he was tried at Winchester — there being the 
plague then in London — and unjustly found guilty of partici- 
pation in an attempt to place Arabella Stuart on the throne, 
and of a secret correspondence with the king of Spain. Raleigh 
was sentenced to death, but reprieved. His personal propert}', 
forfeited by the attainder, was also restored, and he was de- 
tained a prisoner in the Tower, where his wife obtained per- 
mission to live with him, and where his youngest son was born. 
It was during these twelve 3-ears in the Tower that Sir Walter 
Raleigh wrote his fragment of a " Histoiy of the World," 
which fills a substantial folio. It contains five books of the 
first part of the History, beginning at the Creation and ending 
with the Second Macedonian War. The theme of its opening 
chapter is "Of the Creation and Preservation of the World," 



352 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

and the argument of its first section, " that the Invisible God 
is seen in His creatures." Raleigh even discusses fate, fore- 
knowledge, and free-will, before he begins the story of man's 
life on earth, and proceeds with historical detail that includes 
reasonings upon the origin of law and government. There 
was a poet's mind in him, though he shone most as a man of 
action. Spenser had taken pleasure in his verse. A poet's 
sense of the grand energies of life was in Raleigh's conception 
of a History of the World, to keep his busy mind astir during 
imprisonment. This folio was published in 1614, and in 1616, 
the j^ear of Shakespeare's death, Raleigh, by bribing the king's 
favorite, and exciting other hopes of gain, obtained liberty 
without am T formal pardon, and a patent under the Great Seal 
for establishing a settlement in Guiana. The expedition failed, 
and Raleigh was too faithful to the old traditions of his life. 
He returned in July, 1618, having lost his eldest son in an 
attack on the new Spanish settlement of St. Thomas ; and to 
oblige Spain, James I. then caused him, at the age of sixty- 
six, to be executed, without trial, Iry carrying out the fifteen- 
year-old sentence, on the 29th of October, 1618. 

15. Richard Knolles, who was a graduate of Oxford, and who died 
in 1610, aged about sixty-five, deserves remembrance as one of the best 
historians belonging to this period. His principal work is " The General 
History of the Turks," of which the first edition appeared in 1603. 
Alexander Ross was a busy ephemeral writer, with a bent towards 
religious history, who had been master of Southampton School and 
chaplain to Charles I., and who died in 1654. He had published, in 
1617-19, a Latin poem on the History of the Jews; in 1634, a Life of 
Christ, in words and lines taken from Virgil (" Virgilius Evangelizans " ) ; 
and after divers other books, in 1652, " Arcana Microcosmi; or, the Hid 
Secrets of Man's Bodie; " in the same year, in six books, a continuation 
or second part of Ealeigh's "History of the World; " and, in 1653, " A 
Yiew of all Keligions." 

16. Edward Herbert (afterwards known as Lord Her- 
bert of Cherbury) was an elder brother of George Herbert, 
the poet. He was born in 1581, educated at Oxford, visited 
London in 1600, went abroad, joined English auxiliaries in the 
Netherlands, was an intrepid soldier, w r as knighted on the 
accession of James I., was sent in 1616 as ambassador to 
France, was recalled for a bold sajing, sent back again, and in 



To A.D. 1650.] THOMAS FULLER. 353 

16 24 published at Paris a Latin treatise upon Truth — " De 
Veritate " — in which he denounced those who did not hold 
his own five fundamental truths of natural religion. He argued 
that heaven could not reveal to a part only of the world a par- 
ticular religion. Yet he said, that, to encourage himself to 
oppose revelation, he asked for a sign, and was answered by a 
loud yet gentle noise from heaven. He returned from France 
to England at the beginning of the reign of Charles I., was 
made an Irish baron, and in 1631 an English peer, as Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury. In the civil war, he first sided with the 
Parliament, and then went to the king's side at great sacrifice. 
He died in 1648, and in the following year appeared his 
u History of the Life and Reign of Henry VIII.," in which 
little attention is paid to the religious movements of the time. 

17. John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrews, who had 
lived in London after his deposition, died in 1639, aged seventy-four. 
He left behind him a " History of the Church of Scotland, beginning 
the Year of Our Lord 203, and continued to the end of the Reign of 
King James VI.," which was first published in folio in 1655. It is 
an honest book, written by a strong upholder of Episcopacy. Ten 
years younger than Spottiswoode was another actor in ecclesiastical 
controversy, David Calderwood, a Presbyterian divine, who wrote his- 
tory as a strong opponent of Episcopacy, and dealt with that part about 
which he could give valuable information in his " True History of the 
Church of Scotland from the beginning of the Reformation unto the end 
of the Reign of James VI." Calderwood died in 1651. 

18. Thomas Fuller, born at Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire, 
in 1608, was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge. He 
became a popular preacher at St. Benet's, Cambridge, then 
obtained a prebend at Salisbury, and became rector of Broad 
Winsor, in Dorsetshire, when he married. His first publica- 
tion, at the age of twenty-three, was a poem, in three parts, 
" David's Hainous Sinne, Heartie Repentance, Heavie Punish- 
ment." In 1639 appeared, in folio, Fuller's first work of any 
magnitude, "The History of the Holy Warre." In 1641 
he came to London as lecturer at the Savoy Church, in the 
Strand, where his vivacity of speech not only brought to- 
gether crowded audiences within the walls, but also procured 
him listeners outside the windows. In 1642, Fuller published 



354 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

one of the most characteristic of his works, "The Holy and 
Profane States," a collection of ingenious pieces of character- 
writing, moral essays, and short biographical sketches. 
Troubled as the times were, the book went through four editions 
before 1660. The quips and conceits of Fuller's style repre- 
sent the Later Euphuism in its best form, for Fuller had religious 
feeling and high culture, good humor, liberality, quick sense of 
character, and lively wit, which the taste of the day enabled 
him to pour out in an artificial form, with a complete freedom 
from affectation. Culture and natural wit made his quaintness 
individual and true. He wrote during the Commonwealth 
his " Pisgah-Sight of Palestine" (1650), an account of Pal- 
estine and its people, illustrative of Scripture; his "Abel 
Redivivus " (1651), being "Lives and Deaths of the Modern 
Divines, written by several able and learned men;" and (in 
1656), in folio, "The Church History of Britain," from the 
birth of Christ to 1648, which was not the less a piece of 
sound, well-studied work for being quaint in style, good- 
humored, and witt3 T . Under Charles II., he was restored 
to his prebend of Salisbmy, and made D.D. and chaplain to 
the king ; but he lived only until August, 1661. His " Histoiy 
of the Worthies of England" appeared in 1662, and is the 
most popular of all his works. 

19. Advance of scientific inquir} T is a marked feature in the 
literature of the Stuart times, and it was aided greatly by 
Francis Bacon, who during the reign of James I. set forth his 
philosophy. 

He was the son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, Sir Nicho- 
las Bacon, and was born in London, at York House, in the 
Strand, on the 22d of January, 1561. Sir William Cecil, after- 
wards Lord Burghley, and Sir Nicholas Bacon, married two 
daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke. The sister, Anne, married 
by Sir Nicholas, was his second wife. She was an educated 
woman, with strong religious feeling, who took strong interest 
in the reformation of the church, and inclined to the Puritan 
side in later questions of its internal polic3 T . It was she who 
translated Jewel's "Apology" into English. Sir Nicholas 
Bacon had by his former wife six children, and by his second 



To A.D. 1650.] FRANCIS BACON. cb5 

wife two, Anthony and Francis ; Anthony two years older than 
Francis, who was thus the youngest of eight in a household liv- 
ing sometimes in London, at York House, sometimes at Gor- 
hambury, near St. Albans. In April, 1573, when Anthony was 
fourteen and Francis twelve, the two bo}'s were entered as fel- 
low-commoners at Trinity College, Cambridge. Of Francis 
Bacon's career at college, ending in his sixteenth }~ear, we have 
this note from Dr. Rawkyy, his chaplain of after-days : " Whilst 
he was commorant in the universit}', about sixteen 3-ears of age 
(as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he 
first fell into the dislike of the philosoplry of Aristotle ; not for 
the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe 
all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way ; being a 
philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for dis- 
putations and contentions, but barren of the production of 
works for the benefit of the life of man ; in which mind he con- 
tinued to his dying day." 

It was intended that he should be trained for diplomatic life ; 
and accordingly, in 157G, having entered at Gray's Inn, he 
went upon the suite of Sir Arnyas Paulet, the English Ambas- 
sador to Paris. After a little more than two years of this train- 
ing in France to diplomatic life, there came a cloud over the 
prospects of Bacon in the year 1579. In the February of that 
3*ear his father died, after a few da}'s' illness, before completing 
the provision he had meant to make for the younger son \>y his 
second marriage. Francis Bacon, then eighteen years old, 
came to London at the end of March, with commendations to 
the queen from Sir Amyas Paulet, and settled down at Gray's 
Inn to stud}* the law as a profession. 

He was admitted an utter barrister in June, 1582 ; and prob- 
ably about this time, aged twent}--one, sketched briefly in a 
Latin tract, called " Temporis Partus Masculus," the first 
notion of his philosophy. In November, 1584, Bacon took his 
seat in the House of Commons, as member for Melcombe 
Regis, in Dorsetshire. In the next Parliament, which met in 
October, 1586, he sat for Taunton, and was one of those who 
presented a petition for the speedy execution of Mary, Queen 
of Scots. He was next member for Liverpool, active in public 



356 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

affairs, and presented to the ministry a wise paper of bis 
own. called ••An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of 
the Church of England." Its topic was the Marprelate Con- 
troversy, and it contained the germ of his essay " Of Unity in 
Religion." In October, 158£, there was given to Bacon the 
reversion of the office of Clerk of the Council in the Star 
Chamber, worth sixteen hundred or two thousand pounds a year, 
and the further advantage that its work was done by deputy. 
But for this Bacon had almost twenty years to wait : the holder 
of it lived till 1608. If that office had fallen to him early in 
life, Bacon might possibly have given up his career as a law- 
yer, and devoted himself wholly to the working out of his 
philosophy. 

Having sat in Parliament for jlelcornbe Regis. Taunton, and 
Liverpool, he became member for Middlesex in the Parliament 
that met in February. 1593. One of the first questions before 
it was the granting of money to provide against danger from the 
Catholic powers by which England was threatened. The lords 
asked for a treble subsidy, payable within three years, in six in- 
stalments. Bacon assented to the subsidy, but raised a point of 
privilege in objection to the joining of the Commons with the 
Upper House in granting it. The point of privilege was over- 
ruled : the Lords and Commons did confer : the treble subsidy 
was granted : four years instead of three being allowed for the 
payment. Bacon had argued that the payment ought to extend 
over six years, for three reasons — the difficulty, the discontent. 
and the better means of supply than subsidy. His speeches on 
this occasion gave serious offence to the queen. He had no 
longer free access to her at court, and this displeasure made her 
less ready to give him. over the heads of older lawyers, the office 
of attorney-general, which presently fell vacant. The Earl of 
Essex, six years younger than Francis Bacon, was then looked 
to by both Anthony and Francis as their patron, and he did all 
that he could to influence the queen in Bacon's favor. The 
queen hesitated : dwelt on Bacon's youth and small experience 
— he was thirty-three — and in April. 1594. she gave the de- 
sired office to Sir Edward Coke, who was already Solicitor-Gen- 
eral, who had large practice and high reputation as a lawyer. 



To A.D. 1650.] FRANCIS BACON. 357 

and was nine years older than Bacon. "But Coke's appointment 
left vacant the office of Solicitor-General. For this suit was 
made with continued zeal, but in November, 1595, it was given 
to Sergeant Fleming. Essex, generous and impulsive, wished to 
make some amends to Bacon for his disappointment, and gave 
him a piece of land, which he afterwards sold for eighteen hun- 
dred pounds — say about twelve thousand pounds at the present 
value of money. Before July, 1596, Bacon was made Queen's 
Counsel. At the beginning of May in that } T ear, Sir Thomas 
Egerton, who had been Master of the Rolls, became Lord- 
Keeper. Bacon then sought in vain to succeed Egerton as 
Master of the Rolls. 

In 1597, having fallen into debt, he cherished a hope of mar- 
rying the rich 3'oung widow of Sir William Hatton, who died 
in March of that year. In that year, also, Bacon was returned 
to Parliament as member for Ipswich. Essex endeavored to 
help him in his widow hunt. The lad}', in November, 1598, 
married Sir Edward Coke. 

It was in 1597 that Bacon — then thirty-six years old — pub- 
lished, with a dedication to his brother, " Essayes. Religious 
Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion." The 
essays in this first edition were only ten in number, and they 
dealt exclusively with the immediate relations of a man to life ; 
his private use of his own mind ; his use of it in relation to the 
minds of others, in relation to the interests of others, in rela- 
tion to his own interests — personalty, as in case of mone}', 
health, and reputation, and also as they were mixed. up with 
the business of mankind. Thus the ten essays were — 1. Of 
Study; 2. Of Discourse; 3. Of Ceremonies and Respects; 4. 
Of Followers and Friends ; 5. Suitors ; 6. Of Expense ; 7. 
Of Regiment of Health; 8. Of Honour and Reputation; 9. Of 
Faction; 10. Of Negotiating. The relation of man to another 
world was left designedly beyond the range of this first little 
group of essays. The little book, no bigger than the palm of 
a man's hand, in which Bacon made his first appearance as an 
essayist, is thus, throughout, an illustration of that genius for 
analysis applied to the life of man which he applied in his phi- 
iosophy to nature. He used the word wt essay " in its exact 



358 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

sense. The Latin exigere meant to test very exactly, to apply 
to a standard, weight or measure. The late Latin word ex- 
agium meant a weighing, or a standard weight ; thence came 
Italian saggio, a proof, trial, sample ; and assaggiare, to prove 
or try ; whence the French essai, and the English double forms, 
"assay" and " essay." An assay of gold is an attempt to 
ascertain and measure its alloys and to determine accurately its 
character and value. An essay of an}' thing in human nature 
submitted it to a like process within the mind : it was an " es- 
sa} T of" something, and not as we write — now that the true 
sense of the word is obscured — an ' ' essay on. ' ' Strictly in that 
sense Bacon used the word, and the essaj^s, at which we shall 
find his work running side by side with the development of his 
philosophy, have therefore a definite relation to it. The stjie 
of these brief essa}*s, in which every sentence was compact 
with thought aud polished in expression until it might run alone 
through the world as a maxim, had all the strength of Euphuism, 
and none of its weakness. The sentences were all such as it 
needed ingenuity to write ; but this was the rare ingenuhVy of 
wisdom. Each essay, shrewdly discriminative, contained a suc- 
cession of wise thoughts exactly worded. Take, for example, 
the first form of the first words of the first essa} T in this first edi- 
tion : " Studies serve for pastimes, for ornaments, and for abili- 
ties. Their chiefe use for pastime is in privateness and retiring ; 
for ornamente is in discourse, and for abilitie is in judgement. 
For expert men can execute, but learned men are fittest to judge 
or censure. To speud too much time in them is slouth, to use 
them too much for ornament is affectation : to make judgement 
wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholler. The.y perfect 
Nature, and are perfected bj T experience. Craftie men con- 
tinue them, simple men admire them, wise men use them : For 
they teach not their owne use, but that is a wisedome without 
them : and above them wonne b} T observation. Reade not to 
contradict, nor to believe, but to waigh and consider." And so 
forth ; words like these being themselves considered by their 
writer and made more weighty in subsequent editions. Small as 
the book was, the quality of Bacon's mind was proved by this 
first publication of his essays. In 1612, Bacon issued a second 



To A.D. 1650.] FRANCIS BACON. 359 

edition of his " Essa}'s," in which the number was increased 
from ten to thirty-eight, and those formerly printed had been 
very thoroughly revised. The range of thought, also, was 
widened, and the first essa}* was " Of Religion." In 1625, 
he issued a third edition of the " Essays," with their number 
increased to fifty-eight, and again with revision and re- 
arrangement of the earlier matter. The first essa}* in this 
final edition was " Of Truth; " and the essay " Of Religion," 
with its title changed to "Of Unity in Religion," was much 
enlarged and carefully modified, to prevent misconception of its 
spirit. 

In 1598, the next 3*ear after the first publication of his Essaj's, 
Bacon, who had been living be3~ond his means, was arrested for 
debt ; but in the spring of 1601 his worldly means were some- 
what improved by the death of his brother Anthony. He 
obtained a gift of twelve hundred pounds, the fine of one of 
the accomplices of Essex ; but he obtained no higher reward of 
his services before the death of Elizabeth, in 1603, and this 
notwithstanding his efforts to win the queen's favor b}' his 
services in securing the conviction of his benefactor, Lord 
Essex. 

With the accession of James I., Bacon's outward prosperity 
began. He was made Sir Francis by his own wish, in July, 
1603, that he might not lose grade, because new knights were 
multiplying, and there were three of them in his mess at Gray's 
Inn. Essex had been active for James. Bacon told the Earl 
of Southampton that he " could be safely that to him now 
which he had truly been before ; " and adapted himself to the 
new political conditions b} T writing a defence of his recent con- 
duct, as " Sir Francis Bacon his Apologie in certain Impu- 
tations concerning the late Earle of Essex." To the first 
Parliament of King James, Bacon was returned b}^ Ipswich and 
St. Albans. He was confirmed in his office of King's Counsel 
in August, 1604 ; but when the office of Solicitor-General be- 
came vacant again in that year, he was not appointed to it. In 
1605, about the time of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, 
there appeared, in English, "The Twoo Bookes of Francis 
Bacon. Of the Proficience and Advauncement of Learning, 



360 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

Divine and Humane. To the King." These two books of the 
Advancement of Learning form the first part of the groundwork 
of his " Instauratio Magna," or "Great Reconstruction of 
Science." It was dedicated to King James, as from one who 
had been "touched, yea, and possessed, with an extreme 
wonder at those your virtues and faculties which the philoso- 
phers call intellectual ; the largeness of your capacity, the faith- 
fulness of your memory, the swiftness of }x>ur apprehension, the 
penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of 
your elocution." It was fit, therefore, to dedicate to such a 
king a treatise in two parts, one on the excellency- of learning 
and knowledge, the other on the merit and true glory in the 
augmentation and propagation thereof. 

In his first book Bacon pointed out the discredits of learning from 
human defects of the learned, and emptiness of many of the studies 
chosen, or the way of dealing with them. This came especially by the 
mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge, as if 
there were sought in it " a couch whereupon to rest a searching and 
restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk 
up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind 
to raise itself upon ; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and con- 
tention ; or a shop for profit or sale ; and not a rich storehouse for the 
glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." The rest of the 
first book was given to an argument upon the Dignity of Learning; and 
the second book, on the Advancement of Learning, is, as Bacon himself 
described it, "a general and faithful perambulation of learning, with an 
inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and 
converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a plot made 
and recorded to memory may both minister light to any public designa- 
tion, and also serve to excite voluntary endeavors." Bacon makes, by a 
sort of exhaustive analysis, a ground-plan of all subjects of study, as an 
intellectual map, helping the right inquirer in his search for the right 
path. The right path is that by which he has the best chance of adding 
to the stock of knowledge in the world something worth laboring for, as 
labor for "the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." 

In May, 1606, Bacon married Alice Barnham, daughter of a 
London merchant who was dead, and whose widow had taken 
in second marriage Sir John Packington, of Worcestershire . 
The lady had two hundred and twenty pounds a year, which 
was settled on herself. In June, 1607, Sir Francis Bacon 
became Solicitor-General. While rising in his profession he 



To A.D. 1650.] FRANCIS BACON. 361 

was still at work on writings that set forth portions of his 
philosophy. In 1607 he sent to Sir Thomas Bodley his 
"Cogitata et Visa"— a first sketch of the "Novum Or- 
ganum." In 1608 — the }*ear of John Milton's birth — 
Bacon obtained the clerkship of the Star Chamber, of which the 
reversion had been given him in 1589. In February, 1613, 
Bacon contrived, for the gentlemen of Gray's Inn and the 
Inner Temple, a " Masque of the Marriage of the Thames and 
the Rhine," on the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the 
Elector Palatine. In October, 1613, Bacon was made Attorney- 
General. The dispassionate mind that his philosophy required 
Bacon applied somewhat too coldly to the philosoplry of life. 
Without hatreds or warm affections, preferring always a kind 
course to an unkind one, but yielding easily to stubborn facts 
in his search for prosperity, Bacon failed as a man, although he 
had no active evil in his character, for want of a few generous 
enthusiasms. In 1616 Bacon was made a Privy Councillor. 
While the Attorney-General was thus obedient to his master, 
he was suitor for the office of Lord-Keeper, which the bad 
health of Lord-Chancellor Ellesmere would probably soon cause 
him to resign. This office Bacon obtained in March, 1617. 
In January, 1618, he became Lord-Chancellor; six months 
afterwards he was made Baron Verulam. In October, 1620, 
he presented to the king his " Novum Organum," a fragment 
on which he had worked for thirty years, and which formed 
the second and main part of his " Instauratio Magna." Three 
months later he was made, on the 27th of Januar} T , 1621, Vis- 
count St. Albans, and had reached his highest point of great- 
ness. Then came his memorable fall. 

On the loth of March the report of a Parliarnentan' Com- 
mittee on the administration of justice charged the Lord-Chan- 
cellor with twenty-three specified acts of corruption. Bacon's 
final reply was: "Upon advised consideration of the charge, 
descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to 
account as far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously con- 
fess that I am guilt}* of corruption, and do renounce all defence, 
and put myself on the grace and mercy of 3-our lordships." 
lie then, as he had been required to do, replied upon each case, 



362 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

and pleaded guilt}' to four. The lords sent a committee of 
twelve to the Chancellor, to ask whether he had signed this, and 
would stand by his signature. He replied to the question: 
" My lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart. I beseech 
your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." He w r as 
sentenced by the House of Lords, on the 3d of Maj r , 1621, to a 
fine of forty thousand pounds, which the king remitted ; to be 
committed to the Tower during the king's pleasure, and he was 
released next day ; thenceforth to be incapable of holding airy 
office in the State, or sitting in Parliament. It was decided by 
a majority of two that he should not be stripped of his titles. 
Of worldly means there remained what private fortune he had, 
and a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year that the king 
had lately given him. The rest of his life Bacon gave to study, 
only applying, unsuccessfully, in 1623, for the provostship of 
Eton. In 1622 he published, in Latin, as the third part of his 
" Instauratio Magna," his Natural and Experimental History, 
— " Historia Naturalis et Experimentalist ' — and his " Historie 
of the Raigno of K. Henry VII.," dedicated to Charles, Prince 
of Wales. In # 1623 appeared, in Latin, his "History of Life 
and Death," as well as the Latin expansion into nine books of 
"The Advancement of Learning," as a first volume of his 
works. On the 9th of April, 1626, ten years after Shake- 
speare, Francis Bacon died. 

Bacon arranged his writings for the "Instauratio Magna" into six 
divisions: — 1. The books on the "Dignity and Advancement of Learn- 
ing" — the ground-plan. 2. The "Novum Organum," of which only 
the first part was executed, showing what was the new instrument, or 
method of inquiry, which he substituted for the old instrument, the 
"Organon" of Aristotle. 3. The Experimental History of Nature; 
or, Study of the Phenomena of the Universe. In this division Bacon's 
most complete work was the "Silva Silvarum; or, Natural History in 
Ten Centuries." Then came the science raised on these foundations, 
in, 4, the " Scala Intellectus ; " or, Ladder of the Understanding, which 
leads up from experience to science. 5. The "Prodromi; or, the 
Anticipations of the Second Philosophy" — provisional anticipations 
founded on experience, which the investigator needs as starting-points 
in his research; and, 6, "Active Science" — experiment in the fair way 
to such gains of knowledge as may benefit mankind. 

Bacon opposed to the "Organon" of Aristotle, which only analyzed 



To A.D. 1650.] FRANCIS BACON. 363 

the form of propositions, his "New Organon," which sought a method 
of analysis that would attain discoveries enlarging the dominion of man. 
"Human science," he said, "and human power, coincide." Invention 
must be based upon experience ; experience be widened by experiment. 
Bacon's highest and purest ambition was associated with his life-long 
endeavor to direct the new spirit of inquiry into a course that would 
enable men "to renew and enlarge the power and dominion of the 
human race itself over the universe. . . . Now the dominion of men 
over things depends alone on arts and sciences; for Nature is only 
governed by obeying her." Bacon had no sympathy whatever with 
research that consists only in turning the mind back on itself. For him 
the mind was a tool, and nature the material for it to work upon. The 
only remaining way to health, he said, " is that the whole work of the 
mind be begun afresh, and that the mind, from the very beginning, 
should on no account be trusted to itself, but constantly directed." All 
knowledge comes to men from without, and the laws to which we can 
subject natural forces are to be learned only from the interpretation of 
nature. In former clays invention had been left to chance, and science 
had been occupied with empty speculations. A way of inquiry should 
be used that will lead — be inductive — from one experience to another, 
not by chance, but by necessity. Hence Bacon's method has been called 
inductive; but the second and main part of his philosophy was, after 
arriving by this method at a truth in nature, to deduce therefrom its 
uses to man. Having found, for example, by inductive experiment, a 
general truth about electricity, the crowning work of the Baconian 
philosophy would be to deduce from it the Atlantic cable. 

Bacon taught that the inquirer was to take as frankly as a child what- 
ever truths he found. He compared human knowledge with divine, of 
which it is said, " Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter 
into the kingdom of heaven." And he too said, "Little children, keep 
yourselves from idols." "The idols," Bacon said, "and false notions 
which have hitherto occupied the human understanding, and are deeply 
rooted in it, not only so beset the minds of men that entrance is hardly 
open to truth, but, even when entrance is conceded, they will again meet 
and hinder us in the very reconstruction of the sciences, unless men, 
being forewarned, guard themselves as much as possible against them." 
He therefore classified the common forms of false image within the mind 
to which men bow down. They are Idols (1) of the Forum or Market- 
place (Idola Fori), when we take things not for what they are, but 
for what the common talk, as of men in the market-place, considers them 
to be; they are Idols (2) of the Theatre (Idola Theatri), when we bow 
down to authority, or fear to differ from those who have played great 
parts on the world's stage; Idols (3) of Race or Tribe (Idola Tribus) 
are "founded," says Bacon, "in the very tribe or race of men. It is 
falsely asserted that human sense is the standard of things," for the 
human intellect, blending its own nature with an object, distorts 



364 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

and disfigures it. There are Idols also (4) of the Cave or Den (Idola 
Specus) ; these are the accidental faults and prejudices of the individual 
inquirer. 

On his guard against these idols, the philosopher who follows Bacon's 
teaching trusts to pure experience. Every thing in nature appears under 
certain conditions. Comparative experiments can be made to determine 
which of these conditions are essential, and which accidental. Thus we 
may advance from fact to fact, till, by successive testings and compari- 
sons of facts, we reach one of the laws by which the course of nature 
is determined. So we ascend, by the method of induction, from the 
experiment to the axiom. But experiment may seem to have found a 
law with which some fact — some "negative instance" — is at odds. 
This contradiction must not be put out of sight, but taken simply as 
against acceptance of the law till it be reconciled with it. Nay, more, 
the investigator must use all his wit to invent combinations able to dis- 
prove his fact, if it be no fact ; he must seek to invent negative instances, 
acting as counsel against himself until assured that his new fact will 
stand firm against any trial. "I think," said Bacon, "that a form of 
induction should be introduced which from certain instances should 
draw general conclusions, so that the impossibility of finding a contrary 
instance might be clearly proved." When so assured that it stands firm, 
the inquirer may announce his new truth confidently, and either deduce 
from it himself, or leave others to deduce its use to man. 

In this philosophy Bacon did no more than express formally, 
distinctly, and with great influence over the minds of others, 
what had alwa}^ been the tendenc} 7 of English thought. His 
namesake, Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth centuiy, had pursued 
science very much in the same spirit, and had nearly anticipated 
Francis Bacon's warning against the four idols, in his own four 
grounds of human ignorance. We must not forget, also, when 
we find feebleness in the scientific experiments of Francis Bacon 
and his followers, with the retention of much false opinion 
about nature, that what he professed was to show, not grand 
results, but the way to them. He bade his followers "be 
strong in hope, and not imagine that our ' Instauratio ' is 
something infinite and beyond the reach of man, when really it 
is not unmindful of mortality and humanity ; for it does not 
expect to complete its work within the course of a single age, 
but leaves this to the succession of ages ; and, lastly, seeks for 
science, not arrogantly within the little cells of human wit, but 
humbly, in the greater world." 

20. Bacon's philosophy had arisen out of that part of the 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN WILKIN'S. 365 

energ}' of thought, quickened along its whole line, which 
prompted free inquiry into nature. It gave new impulse and 
a definite direction to the movement that produced it. Scien- 
tific studies had new charms for man}' minds, and there was an 
enthusiasm for experiment in the Baconian way. Many a quiet 
thinker, to whom civil war was terrible, turned aside from the 
tumult of the times, and found rest for his mind in the calm 
study of nature. Such men were drawn together b} T commu- 
nity of taste, driven together also by the discords round about 
them ; and the influence of Bacon's books upon the growing 
eneigy of scientific thought was aided b}' the civil war. 

But years before the civil war, the spirit of inquiry began to be active 
for advance of science. John Napier, of Merchistoun, used the same 
mind which had spent its energies, in 1593, upon " A Plaine Discovery 
of the whole Revelation of St. John," upon the discovery of the use of 
Logarithms, and set forth his invention, in 1614, as "Mirificl Logarith- 
morum Canonis Descriptio." In the following year, 1615, William 
Harvey probably first brought forward, in lectures at the College of 
Physicians, his discovery of the circulation of the blood, afterwards more 
fully established and set forth in a small book, early in the reign of 
Charles I. Harvey at first lost practice by his new opinions, and his 
doctrine was not received by any physician who was more than forty 
years old; but he was made, in 1623, Physician Extraordinary to James 
I., and in 1632 Physician to Charles I. 

21. John Wilkins was born in 1614, the son of a goldsmith, at 
Oxford, was educated there, graduated, took orders, and was chap- 
lain, first to Lord Say, then to the Count Palatine of the Rhine. When 
the civil war broke out, he took the Solemn League and Covenant. In 
1638 he published anonymously, "The Discovery of a New World; or, 
a Discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another 
Habitable World in the Moon." In 1640 this was followed by a "Dis- 
course concerning a New Planet; tending to prove that 'tis probable our 
Earth is one of the Planets." Wilkins's book on the world in the moon 
closed with an argument for the proposition "that 'tis possible for some 
of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world ; and if 
there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them." His other 
tract, in support of the doctrine set forth by Copernicus, in 1543, and 
developed in the time of Charles I. by Galileo, included a temperate 
endeavor to meet those prevalent theological objections to which Galileo 
had been forced to bend. In 1641, he called attention to various 
methods of cipher-writing, as well as of telegraphing, by his "Mercury; 
or, the Secret and Swift Messenger: Shewing how a Man may with 
Privacy and Speed Communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at a Dis- 



366 MAXUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. i£oo 

tance." In 1668, he was made Bishop of Chester; and in the same 

year his most interesting work, "An Essay towards a Real Char- 
acter and a Philosophical Language," was printed by the Royal So- 
ciety. This applied natural philosophy to language, and la" 
towards the deduction from, first principles of quickei xrarse 

among men. by an easy common language in which significant signs 
were to build up the meaning of each word. Bishop Wilkins died in 
1672. at his friend Tillotsou's house in Chancery Lane. 

22. Samuel Hartlib was of a good Polish family: ancestors of his 
had been Privy Councillors to Emperors of Germany. He came to Eng- 
land about 16l ; 5. and his active beneficent mind brought him into friend- 
ship with many of the earnest thinkers of the time. In 1641. Hartlib 
published " A Brief Relation of that which hath been lately attempted 
to procure Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants."* and a "Description 
of Maearia." his ideal of a well-ordered state. In the midst of the strife 
of civil war. Hartlib was wholly occupied with scientific study, having 
especial regard to the extension and improvement of education, and the 
development of agriculture and manufactures. In 1642 he translated 
from the Latin of a Moravian pastor. John Amos Comenius. two 
treatises on "A Reformation of Scin_>oies." His zeal for the better 
education of the people, as a remedy for their distresses, caused him 
not only to give thought to the education of the poor, but also to at- 
tempt the establishment of a school for the improved education of the 
rich: and he asked Milton to print bis ilea? on the subject; hence the 
tract of eight pages publisher 1 by Milton, in 1644, without titlepage, 
but inscribed on the top in one line. "' Of Education. To Mr. Samuel 
Hartlib." In 1651 Hartlib edited a treatise on " Blemish Agriculture."' 
which gave counsel that added greatly to the wealth of England. 
Among Hartlib' s schemes was a plan for a sort of guild of science, 
which should unite students of nature into a brotherhood while they 
sought knowledge in the way set forth by Francis Bacon. 

23, A young man of science who did not separate himself from the 
contest of the time was the mathematician. John Wallis, born in 1616, 
son of a rich incumbent of Ashford. Kent. His father died when he 
was six years old. his mother educated him for a learned profession, he 
went at sixteen to Emmanuel College. Cambridge, and is see:! to have 
been the first student who maintained Harvey" s new doctrine of the 
circulation of the bleed. There was no study of mathematics then 
in Cambridge: the best mathematicians were in London, and their 
science was little esteemed, Wallis graduated, obtained a fellowship at 
Queen's College, took orders in 1640. and acted as chaplain in private 
families until the Civil War. He then took the side of the Parliament, 
and used his mathematical skill in reading the secret ciphers of the 
Royalists. In 1643, be obtained the living of St Gabriel, Fenchurch 
Street. In the same year the death of his mother gave him independ- 
ent fortune. In 1644 he married, and was one of the secretari 



To A.D. 1650.] JOIIX WALLIS. 367 

the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. In 1645 lie was among the 
men of science, and took part in the meetings which led to the forma- 
tion of the Royal Society. In 1648 he was rector of a church in Iron- 
monger Lane. He remonstrated against the execution of Charles 
I., and in 1649 he was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at 
Oxford. He died in 1703. 



CHAPTER VII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 
RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITI- 
CAL "WRITERS. 

1. Owen Feltham.— 2. Henry More. — 3. Richard Sibbes. — 4. Jeremy Taylor. — 5. 
William Prynne. — 6. Peter Heylin. — 7. William Chillingworth. — 8. Philip 
Huntoii ; Sir Robert Filmer. — 9. John Gauden. — 10. John Milton. 

1. The religious mind of England had in the da} T s of James 
I. and of Charles I., as alwa} T s, manifold expression. There 
were many readers of the " Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Po- 
litieal," published about 1628, by Owen Feltham, a man of 
middle-class ability, with a religious mind, who was maintained 
in the household of the Earl of Thomond. His Resolves are one 
hundred and forty-six essa} T s on moral and religious themes, the 
writing of a quiet churchman, who paid little attention to the 
rising controversies of his day. 

2. Henry More represented Platonism. He was born in 
1614, at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, educated at Eton and 
Christ Church, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship. 
He abandoned Calvinism, was influenced by Tauler's " Theo- 
logia Germanica," and fed his spiritual aspirations with writ- 
ings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Iamblichus, 
and Platonists of Italy at the time of the revival of scholarship. 
Henry More was for a time tutor in noble families, obtained a 
prebend at Gloucester, but soon resigned it in favor of a friend. 
Content with a small competence, he declined preferment, and 
sought to live up to his own ideal as a Christian Platonist. He 
lived on through the reign of Charles II., and died in 1687, aged 
sevent}^-three. The Platonism which had been a living influence 
upon Europe at the close of the fifteenth century had its last 
representative in Hemy More. In 1642 he published "Wvxcadia 
Platonica; or, a Platonical Song of the Soul," in four books ; 



A.D. i6oo.] HENRY MORE. 369 

with prefaces and interpretations, published in 1647, as " Philo- 
sophicall Poems." The first book, " Psychozoia " (the Life of 
the Soul), contained a " Christiano-Platonicall display of life." 
The Immortality of the Soul was the theme of the second part, 
" Psychathanasia," annexed to which was a metrical " Essay 
upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles." The 
third book contained " A Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul, 
after Death," and was called " Antipsychopannychia," with an 
Appendix on " The Prae-existency of the Soul." Then came 
" Antimonopsy chia," or the fourth part of the "Song of the 
Soul," containing a confutation of the Unit} T of Souls ; w T here- 
unto is annexed a paraphrase upon Apollo's answer concerning 
Plotinus's soul departed this life. This poem was throughout 
written in the Spenserian stanza, with imitation also of Spenser's 
English. The books were divided into cantos, and each canto 
headed in Spenser's manner. Thus, the first canto of Book I. 
is headed : 

" Struck with the sense of God's good will, 

The immortality 
Of souls I sing; praise with my quill 

Plato's philosophy." 

But there is no better reason wiry it should not. have been all 
written in prose, than the evidence it gives that Platonism came 
as poetry to Henry More, although he was not himself a great 
poet. He also published, with a dedication to Cudworth, the 
Hebrew Professor at Cambridge, his " Conjectura Cabbalistica, " 
a triple interpretation of the three first chapters of Genesis, 
with a "Defence" of it. The Jewish Cabala was conceived 
to be a traditional doctrine or exposition of the Pentateuch, 
which Moses received from the mouth of God while he was on 
the mount with him. Henry More's book expounded " a three- 
fold Cabala," which was, he said, "the dictate of the free reason 
of my mind, needfully considering the written text of Moses, 
and carefully canvassing the expositions of such interpreters as 
are ordinarily to be had upon him." The threefold division of 
his " Cabala " was into literal, philosophic, and moral. More 
wrote also against atheism, and on theological topics. 

3. Intense religious feeling, Puritan in tone, was expressed in the ser- 



370 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1600 

mons and books of Richard Sibbes (born in 1577), who was master of 
Catherine Hall when Milton was at Cambridge, and a frequent preacher 
in the university. Of the two great English universities, Cambridge was 
the stronghold of the Puritans. Sermons by Sibbes were published as 
his "Saints' Cordials," in 1629. To his "Bruised Reede and Smoking 
Flax," in which other sermons were collected, Baxter said that he owed 
his conversion. Richard Sibbes died in 1635. 

4. Jeremy Taylor was born at Cambridge, in August, 
1613, the son of a barber, who, according to one account, sent 
him, when three years old, to a free school then just founded 
by Dr. Stephen Perse. At thirteen, Jeremy Taylor left this 
school to enter Caius College as a sizar, or poor scholar. He 
had proceeded to the degree of B.A., and been ordained, by 
the time he was twenty-one. A college friend then asked 
young Taylor to preach for him at St. Paul's. He had, like 
Milton, outward as well as inward beauty, and a poet's mind. 
Archbishop Laud heard of his sermons, called him to preach 
at Lambeth, and became his friend. Laud having more pat- 
ronage and influence at Oxford than at Cambridge, Taylor was 
incorporated there, and the archbishop procured for him a 
fellowship of All Souls, by using his sole authority as Visitor 
of the College to overrule the statutes which required that 
candidates should be of three years' standing in the univer- 
sity. Laud also made the young divine his chaplain ; and in 
March, 1638, obtained for him the rectory of Uppingham, in 
Rutlandshire. One year later, in May, 1639, Taylor was mar- 
ried. Three years afterwards his youngest son died, in May, 
1642, and his wife died shortly afterwards. He was left with 
two infant sons, at the time when the breach between the king 
and Commons had become irreparable. Then he was made 
one of the king's chaplains, and joined the king ; perhaps when, 
in August, the latter was on his way to hoist the royal standard 
at Nottingham. In October, 1642, the Parliament resolved 
on sequestration of the livings of the loyal clergy. Jeremy 
Taylor, like Herrick and others, was deprived. The indeci- 
sive battle of Edge Hill was fought in the same month. In 
November, the king marched upon London ; there was a 
fight at Brentford. The Londoners mustered their trained 
bands. It was the occasion of Milton's sonnet, "When the 



ToA.D. 1650. J JEREMY TAYLOR. 371 

Assault was Intended to the City." But the Royalists retired, 
and at the end of November the king was at winter-quarters in 
Oxford. There Jerenry Taylor published his "Episcopacy 
Asserted," and was rewarded, at the age of twenty-nine, with 
the degree of Doctor of Divinity. On the 26th of Januaiy, 
1643, Parliament passed a bill for the utter abolition of Episco- 
pacy. Earl}' in 1644, Jeremy Taylor was a chaplain with the 
royal arnrv in AY ales. He was imprisoned for a time, after the 
defeat at Cardigan ; then married a Welsh lad} T , Joanna Bridges, 
who had some property at Llangadock, in Carmarthenshire ; and 
with two companions — William Nicholson, afterwards Bishop 
of Gloucester, and William Wyatt, afterwards a Prebendary of 
Lincoln — Jeremy Taylor kept a school, Newton Hall, in Car- 
marthenshire, at Llanvihangel Aberb3'thyrch. In this Welsh 
village Taylor wrote his best works, and first, in 1647, his 
tc Liberty of Prophes}ing," a plea for freedom to all in the 
interpretation of the Bible, with one simple standard of external 
authority, the Apostles' Creed. In this book Jeremy Taylor 
showed, of course, the natural bent of his mind towards author- 
it}' in Church and State. He would have a church of every 
country contained within its political boundaries, and allowed 
the ruler more power to secure uniformity than would be prac- 
tically consistent with his theory ; but this represents only the 
form of thought which was as natural to him as his different 
form of thought to Milton. It was warmed in Jeremy Taylor 
with true fervor of devotion, and brought home to the sym- 
pathies of men by a pure spirit of Christian charit}'. The 
mischiefs of prevailing discord came, he said, " not from this, 
that all men are not of one mind, for that is neither necessary 
nor possible, but that every opinion is made an article of faith, 
eveiy article is a ground of quarrel, every quarrel makes a 
faction, every faction is zealous, and all zeal pretends for God, 
and whatsoever is for God cannot be too much. We b} T this 
time are come to that pass, we think we love not God except 
we hate our brother." 

And these were the last words in the book: "I end with a story 
which I find in the Jews' books. When Abraham sat at his tent-door, 
according to his custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old 



372 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. "A.D. 1600 

man stooping and leaning on his staffi, wearg age and travail, com- 

-vards him, who was an hundred years :: age; he received him 

kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, caused him to sit down; hut 
observing that the old man ate and prayed not, nor begged for a bless- 
ing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of 
heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and 
acknowledged no other god ; at which answer Abraham grew so zealously 
angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and exposed him to all 
the evils of the night and an unguarded condition. When the old man 
was gone, G-od called to Abraham, and asked him where the stranger 
was. He replied, 'I thrust him away because he did not worship thee.* 
&od answered him, ' I have suffered him these hundred years, although 
he dishonored me ; and couldst not thou endure him one night, when he 
gave thee no trouble ? ' Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him 
back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruc- 
tion. i G-o thou and do likewise," and thy charity will be rewarded by 
the God of Abraham. 

In 1649. he publi^iirA " The Great Exemplai :: Sanctity and 
Holy Life, according to the Christie:: Institution, described in 

the History of the Life and Death of Christ; " in 1650, his 
" Holy Living," with ' ; Prayers for our Rulers," altered after- 
wards to "Prayers for the King ; " in 1651, his " Holy Dying ; " 
and the first volume for the * 4 Summer Half-year" of •• A 
Course of Sermons for all the Sundays in the Year." His 
friend, Lady Carbery, died in October. 1650, and Taylor 
preached her funeral sernion with the tender piety of Mend- 
ship. When he wrote verse, he failed as a poet. He was 
no master in that form of expression ; but natural grace of 
mind, with a fine culture, liveliness of fancy, the unaffected 
purity of his own standard of life upon earth, and, in the midst 
of all the tumult of the time, "the strange ;venness and un- 
troubled passage ; ' with which he was himself, as he said of 
Lady Carbery. slidiDg towards his ocean of God and of in- 
finity with a certain and silent motion, has filled his prose 
with the true poetry of life. In 1655 he applied the name of 
Lord Carbery' s house to a book of devotion, u The Golden 
Grove ; or, a Manual of Daily Prayers and Litanies fitted to 
the Days of the Week: also, Ft -rival Hymns, according to 
the Manner of the Ancient Church." He was imprisoned 
twice during the Commonwealth, and brought down on himself 



To A.D. 1650.] WILLIAM PRYNNE. 373 

a controversy upon original sin by his " Unnm Necessarium ; 
or, The Doctrine and Practice of Repentance." In 1657 he 
published a " Discourse on the Measures and Offices of Friend- 
ship," addressed to Mrs. Catherine Philips, with whom we 
shall meet again as the first Englishwoman who earned good 
fame as a poet. At this time Jeremy Taylor was preach- 
ing in London, and had John Evelyn among his friends. 
Lord Conway, who had a residence at Portmore, offered 
him the post of alternate lecturer at Lisburn, nine miles 
from his house. Taylor accepted it, and went to Ireland in the 
summer of 1658. Even then he was not left wholly in peace ; 
"for," he wrote, "a Presbyterian and a madman have in- 
formed against me as a dangerous man to their religion, and 
for using the sign of the cross in baptism." He was taken to 
Dublin, but obtained easy acquittal. 

In June, 1660, he published his " Ductor Dubitantium ; or, 
the Rule of Conscience in all her General Measures," a book 
of casuistry, which he had designed to be the great work of his 
life. It was dedicated to Charles II., and was followed in two 
months by "The Worth}* Communicant." In August he was 
nominated Bishop of Down and Connor ; he was made also 
Vice-Chan cellor of Dublin University, and a member of the 
Irish Privy Council. In April, 1661, he had the adjacent 
bishopric of Dromore united with Down and Connor, in con- 
sideration of his "virtue, wisdom, and industry." At the 
opening of the Irish Parliament, in Ma}', 1661, Jeremy Taylor 
preached, and admonished his hearers to oppress no man for 
his religious opinions, to deal equal justice to men of all forms 
of faith, and to "do as God does, who in judgment remembers 
mercy." He still lived near Portmore, and made pious use of 
his newly-acquired wealth. He apprenticed poor children, 
maintained promising youths at the university, and rebuilt 
the choir of Dromore Cathedral. In 1664 he issued, with 
addition of a second part, his " Dissuasive from Popery," first 
published in 1647. He died, aged fifty-five, on the 13th of 
August, 1667, in the } T ear of the publication of "Paradise 
Lost." 

5. William Prynne, born in 1600, at Swainswick, near Bath, edu- 



374 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

cated at Oriel College, Oxford, and then a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, 
represented Puritan opinion by writing, in 1628, " Health's Sickness, 
or the Sinfulness of Drinking Healths," and a tract on "The Unloveli- 
ness of Lovelocks." His tracts in the reign of Charles I. were very- 
numerous, and upon every point of controversy maintained by the 
Puritans. In 1633 he published, against plays, masques, balls, and other 
such entertainments, " Histrio-mastix: the Players' Scourge or Actors' 
Tragedie," For this book Prynne was committed to the Tower, prose- 
cuted in the Star Chamber, and sentenced to pay a fine to the king of 
five thousand pounds, to be expelled from the University of Oxford, 
from the Society of Lincoln's Inn, and from his profession of the law; 
to stand twice in the pillory, each time losing an ear ; to have his book 
burnt before his face by the hangman ; and to suffer perpetual imprison- 
ment. In 1637, for another libel, he was condemned by the same court 
to lose what was left of his ears, to have his cheeks branded, to pay 
another fine of five thousand pounds, and to be confined for life in 
Caernarvon Castle. At the meeting of the Long Parliament, he returned 
in triumph to London, became a member of the House of Commons, 
and was leading manager in the prosecution of Archbishop Laud. Then, 
having ended his battle with Episcopacy, and had his revenge on Laud, 
he turned his bitterness against the Independents. He was strong for 
reconcilement with the king. Under the Commonwealth he was in 
opposition to the Independents, openly defied Cromwell's authority, and 
was imprisoned. He assisted in the Restoration, sat for Bath in Parlia- 
ment, and became under Charles II. Keeper of the Records in the Tower, 
with a salary of five hundred pounds a year. In this reign he published 
the three folios known as Prynne's Records, "An Exact Chronological 
and Historical Demonstration of our British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, 
Norman, English Kings' Supreme Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in and over 
all Spiritual or Religious Affairs, etc." These records of the ecclesias- 
tical jurisdiction of the kings of England extend to the end of the reign 
of Edward I. Prynne died in 1669. 

6. Prynne's controversial activity against Laud and his policy was 
met by that of Peter Heylin, a divine of Laud's own school, who had 
published, in 1622, " Microcosmus, or a little Description of the great 
World," and, in 1629, became chaplain to Charles I. Dr. Heylin, who 
was born in 1600 and died in 1662, was a prolific writer, bitter against 
Puritans, and very faithful in maintaining the divine authority of church 
and king. 

7. William Chillingworth was born at Oxford, in 1602, 
and had Land for his godfather. Chillingworth became a 
fellow of Trinity^ was converted to the Roman faith by John 
Fisher, the Jesuit, reconverted by Laud, returned to Oxford, 
inquired freely into religion, and published, in 1637, dedicated 



To A.D. 1650.] SIR ROBERT FILMER. 375 

to Charles I., his " Religion of the Protestants a Safe Way to 
Salvation." Chillingworth's inquiry led him to dissent from 
the Athanasian Creed and some points of the Thirty-nine 
Articles. That stayed his promotion; but in 1638 he was 
induced to subscribe as a sign of his desire for peace and union, 
but not of intellectual assent. He then obtained preferment in 
the church, and was in the civil war so thoroughly Royalist 
that he acted as engineer at the siege of Gloucester. He was 
taken prisoner at the siege of Arundel, and died in 1644. One 
of the worst examples of the bitterness of theologic strife was 
published immediately after his death, by Francis Cheynell, in 
a pamphlet called " Chillingworthi Novissima ; or, the Sickness, 
Heresy, Death, and Burial of William Chilling worth." He was 
the friend of Laud, and therefore counted as an enemy by 
Francis Cheynell ; but he was a man of the best temper, as 
well as a clear, close reasoner. 

8. Philip Hunton, a Nonconformist minister, published 
in 1643-44 a treatise on Monarchy, in two parts, with a Vindi- 
cation. Part One inquired into the nature of Monarch}* ; Part 
Two argued that the sovereignty of England is in the Three 
Estates — King, Lords, and Commons. This doctrine was after- 
wards, in 1683, condemned by the Convocation of the University 
of Oxford, and the book publicly burnt. Two or three years 
later it was answered by Sir Robert Filmer, an upholder of 
absolute monarch}', who based it upon patriarchal authority, and 
combated every form of the assertion that men were born equal. 
Filmer's reply to Hunton, published in 1646, was entitled 
"Anarchy of a Mixed and Limited Monarchy." Sir Robert 
was the son of Sir Edward Filmer, of East Sutton, in Kent. 
He entered Trinity College as a student in 1604, and died 
in 1688. The book for which he is remembered, his " Patri- 
archa," written about 1642, was not published until 1680; 
but in 1648 he expressed much of his argument in a pam- 
phlet on "The Power of Kings, and in Particular of the 
King of England," which sets out with this practical defini- 
tion of the king's absolute power not subject to any law : 
"If the sovereign prince be exempted from the laws of his 
predecessors, much less shall he be bound by the laws he 



376 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

maketh himself ; for a man may well receive a law from another 
man, but impossible it is in nature for to give a law unto him- 
self." Filmer published, also in 1648, "The Freeholder's 
Grand Inquest touching our Sovereign Lord the King and his 
Parliament," endeavoring to prove from history that the king 
alone makes laws and is supreme judge in Parliament ; that 
"the Commons by their writ are only to perform and consent 
to the ordinances of Parliament," and that the Lords "are 
only to treat and give counsel to Parliament." In 1652 he 
published "Observations upon Mr. Hobbes's Leviathan, Mr. 
Milton against Salmasius, and H. Grotius De Jure Belli et 
Pacis, concerning the Originall of Government." Filmer re- 
pudiated Hobbes's notion of authority established by a cove- 
nant among men naturally equal, his own faith being that 
authority was given by divine appointment from the first. 

9. John G-auden, born in 1605, was educated at Cambridge, 
and became rector of Brightwell, Berkshire. In November, 
1640, he preached before the House of Commons a sermon on 
" The Love of Truth and Peace," which so pleased them that 
they gave him a silver tankard, and the rich deanerj' of Book- 
ing, Essex. As the conflict went on between the king and the 
Parliament, Dr. Gauden turned wholly to the former ; and in 
1649, about a fortnight before the execution of Charles I., Gau- 
den published his " Religious and Loyal Protestation against 
the present Declared Purposes and Proceedings of the Army 
and others, about the Tiying and Destroying our Sovereign 
Lord the King. Sent to a Collonell to bee presented to the 
Lord Fairfax, and his Generall Councell of Officers, the first. of 
January," 1648 (New Style, 1649). This was "Printed for 
Richard Royston ; " and Richard Royston was then printing 
another work of Gauden' s, which was not issued until a few 
da} T s after the execution, but its appearance at such a time 
made it a power. It was called " Eixwv Baodixr/ " (Eikon Basi- 
like, the Ro}-al Image), " The True Pourtraicture of His Sacred 
Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings." It was written in 
the first person, professing to be the work of Charles himself, 
displa} T ing his piety while it set forth an explanation of his pol- 
icy. It was in twenty-eight sections, as : 1 . " Upon his Majes- 



To A. D. 1650.] JOHN GAUDEN. 377 

ties calling this last Parliament ; " 2. " Upon the Earl of Straf- 
ford's Death ; " and so forth, usually giving, as from the king's 
own lips, a popular interpretation of his actions, and each sec- 
tion ending with a strain of prayer. One section, the twenty-fifth, 
consisted wholly of "Penitential Meditations and Vows in the 
King's Solitude at Holmby ; " the twent}'- seventh was fatherly 
counsel " To the Prince of Wales ; " and the twenty-eighth 
closed the series with " Meditations upon Death, after the Votes 
of Non- Addresses, and his Majesty 's closer Imprisonment in 
Carisbrook Castle." When Gauden was at work upon his 
book for the king, he showed his design to Anthony Walker, 
Rector of Fifield, who agreed with his strong desire to aid the 
king, but doubted the moralit}' of personating him ; to which 
Gauden replied, "Look on the title, 'tis 'The Pourtraicture,' 
etc., and no man draws his own picture." Dr. Walker was 
with Gauden when he called on the Bishop of Salisbury (Dr. 
Duppa), left Gauden and the bishop to a private talk, and was 
told afterwards that the bishop had liked the work, but thought 
there should be sections added on " The Ordinance against the 
Common Prayer Book," and "Their Deirving his Majesty the 
attendance of his Chaplains." As bishop and as chaplain to 
the king, Duppa felt strongly on these points, and he had agreed 
to write the sections upon them (sixteenth and twenty-fourth in 
the printed book). The book being finished, a cop}* of it was 
sent to King Charles hy the hands of the Marquis of Hertford, 
when he went to the Isle of Wight. This was the cop} r found 
with corrections upon it in the king's handwriting. Time 
pressed, and it was thought the better course to publish at 
once, without waiting for his Majesty's permission. The press 
was corrected by Mr. Simmonds, a persecuted minister, and the 
last part of the manuscript was taken by Anthony Walker on 
its way to the printer's on the 23d of December, 1648. The 
Marquis of Hertford afterwards told Mrs. Gauden that the 
king had wished the book to be issued not as his own, but as 
another's ; but it was argued that Cromwell and others of the 
army having got a great reputation with the people for parts and 
piet}*, it would be best to be in the king's name, and his Majesty 
took time to consider of it. When the book appeared its au- 



378 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. (A.D. 1C00 

thorshipwas known to the Marquis of Hertford. Lord Capel, 
Bishop Duppa, Bishop Morley, and a few other persons. After 
the restoration. Charles II. said to Gauden. that if it had eoine 
out a week sooner it would have saved his father's life. It 
would not have done that ; but it touched the religious feeling 
of the people, and excited a strong sympathy. At home and 
abroad fifty thousand copies were circulated in a twelvemonth. 

Dr. Gauden, who was not backward in pressing upon the 
restored monarch his own claims to gratitude, was made Bishop 
of Exeter before the end of 16 '30 : had in a few months twenty 
thousand pounds in Ones for the renewal of leases: thought 
himself poorly rewarded : pressed for Winchester, got "Worces- 
ter, and died six months afterwards. Lord Clarendon, vexed by 
Gauden' s importunities, wrote to him (March 13. 1661) f 
he was Bishop of Exeter : • ■ The particular which you often re- 
1. I : ' :-onfesse was imparted to me under secrecy, and of 
which I lid not take myself to be at liberty to take notice : and 
truly when it ceases to be a secret. I know nobody will be gladd 
of it but Mr. Milton. I have very often wished I had never 
been trust* ] with it.*' 

10. In the principal strifes of the civil war and the Com- 
monwealth. John Milton bore a I rave and strong part, turning 
away from his high plans as a poet, and giving to controversial 
prose the best years of his manhood. 

In 1641 the great argument was for and against Episcopacy. 
Bishop Hall's " Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of 
Parliament " appeared at the end of January, in defence of the 
Liturgy and of Episcopal Government. Towards the close of 
March appeared " An Answer to a Book entituled -An Humble 
Remonstrance' . . . Written by Smectymnuus." This name 
was compounded of the initials of the five divines who took 
part in its production. — Stephen Marshall. Edmund Calamy. 
Thomas Young. Matthew Xewcomen. and William Spurstow. 
A few weeks later, when the Bishops' Exclusion Bill was await- 
ing the decision of the Lords, and when the Commons, on the 
27th of May. had expressed their mind n ongly by pass- 

ing the first and second reading of a •• Root and Branch" Bill, 
" For the utter abolishing and taking away of all Archbishops, 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON. 879 

Bishops," etc., Milton published his first pamphlet, entitled, 
" Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England, and 
the Causes that hitherto have hindered it : Two Books, written 
to a Friend." In the first book he argued, that, in and after 
the reign of Henry. VIII., Reformation of the church was most 
hindered by retaining ceremonies of the Church of Rome, and 
by giving irresponsible power to bishops, who, though they had 
removed the Pope, yet " hugged the popedom, and shared the 
authority among themselves." In his second book, Milton 
argued from history that the political influence of prelacy had 
always been opposed to liberty. This pamphlet of ninety 
pages was followed quickly by a shorter pamphlet in twenty- 
four pages, entitled " Of Prelatical Episcopacy; and whether 
it may be deduc'd from the Apostolical Times b}- vertue of 
those Testimonies which are alleg'd to that purpose in some 
late Treatises, one whereof goes under the Name of James, 
Archbishop of Armagh." While the controversy was at its 
height, Milton's pen had no rest, and he soon came out with 
a third pamphlet, "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's 
Defence against Smectymnuus." In the first months of 1642 he 
published, near the time when the king gave his assent to the 
bill excluding bishops from the House of Lords, the fourth of 
his pamphlets on this subject, now first setting his name upon 
the title-page. This was " The Reason of Church Government 
urg'd against Prelaty, by Mr. John Milton: In Two Books." 
His fifth pamphlet came soon afterward, " An Apology against 
a Pamphlet call'd A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions 
of the Remonstrant against Smedymnuus." 

Five pamphlets within a 3-ear had now represented Milton's 
part in the argument upon Episcopacy, and he had delivered 
his mind on the subject. In his fourth pamphlet, Milton ex- 
pressed his spirit, as a writer, in the midst of strife on questions 
of this kind. 

The duty was burdensome. " For, surely, to every good and peace- 
able man, it must in nature needs be a hateful thing to be the displeaser 
and molester of thousands; much better would it like him doubtless to 
be the messenger of gladness and contentment, which is his chief in- 
tended business to all mankind, but that they resist and oppose their 
own true happiness. But when God commands to take the trumpet and 



380 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall 
say, or what he shall conceal. . . . For me, I have determined to lay up, 
as the best treasure and solace of a good old age, if God vouchsafe it 
me, the honest liberty of free speech from my youth, where I shall think 
it available in so dear a concernment as the church's good." If the end 
of the struggle be oppression of the church, how shall he bear in his old 
age the reproach of the voice within himself, saying, "When time was, 
thou couldst not find a syllable of all that thou hadst read or studied to 
utter in her behalf ? Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired 
thoughts out of the sweat of other men. Thou hadst the diligence, the 
parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were to be adorned or 
beautified ; but when the cause of God and His Church was to be pleaded, 
for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast, God lis- 
tened if He could hear thy voice among His zealous servants, but thou 
wert dumb as a beast; from henceforward be that which thine own 
brutish silence hath made thee." In this spirit Milton maintained 
throughout his prose writing that which he believed to be the cause of 
liberty. Were he wise only to his own ends, he said, he would write 
with leisurely care upon such a subject as of itself might catch applause, 
and " should not choose this manner of writing, wherein knowing myself 
inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I 
have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand." Many a man of 
genial temper and predominating gentleness of life has gone as a soldier 
into battle, and struck death about him without stopping to discrimi- 
nate the true merits .of those whose skulls he cleft. He knew only that 
one of two sides was to prevail, and while the battle raged he was to do 
his duty as a soldier. In bloodless war of controversy for a vital cause, 
where the appeal is on a few broad questions to national opinion, there 
may be like need to beat roughly down opposing arguments, to roll in 
the dust and inarch over the credit of opposing reasoners, without stay- 
ing a blow to an opponent's credit as a reasoner from just consideration 
of his feelings and impartial weighing of his merits. The day may come 
when we shall all argue with philosophical precision, and call equal 
attention to the merits and the faults of those over whom we struggle to 
prevail. It certainly is nearer than it was in Milton's time. Controversy 
then was simply a strong wrestle, with the single desire in each wrestler 
to secure the fall of his antagonist. So Milton wrestled, and gave many 
a rough hug with his intellectual arm, but he sought only the triumph 
of his cause by strife of mind with mind: his antagonists opposed to 
him argument rough as his own, with coarse abuse; and their support- 
ers, when they could, had argued with the prison and the pillory. But 
Milton never called for pains and penalties on an opponent. 

The next subject of controversy in which Milton engaged 
was that relating to divorce, — a subject pressed upon his 
attention by his own unfortunate marriage. It was in May or 



ToA.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON. 381 

June, 1643, that lie married his first wife, Mary Powell, of a 
Royalist family with which Milton had long been intimate. 
She was then in her eighteenth }'ear, and he was almost thirty- 
five. Her experience was of a Cavalier country gentleman's 
way of free housekeeping and social enjoyment. The philo- 
sophic calm of the house in Aldersgate Street was new to her, 
and at first irksome. Milton's young wife was allowed or en- 
couraged by her family to fly from the first difficult}'. " By 
the time," says Milton's nephew, " she had for a month or 
thereabout led a philosophical life, her friends, possibly incited 
by her own desire, made earnest suit by letter to have her 
compairy the remaining part of the summer." She was to 
return at Michaelmas, but did not. Milton sought in vain to 
win back his wife ; and having nothing of matrimon}' but its 
chain, his mind was left to pursue its course of thought upon 
the bond of marriage. Already, in August, 1643, he had 
published his treatise in two books on "The Doctrine and 
Discipline of Divorce," addressed to the Parliament and the 
Westminster Assembly then sitting, written wholly without 
passion or personal reference, and arguing from a pure and 
spiritual sense of marriage as a bond for the mutual aid and 
comfort of souls rather than of bodies. He asked that among 
reforms then under discussion there might be included a revisal 
of the canon law, which allowed divorce only on grounds less 
valid than "that indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, 
arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, hindering, and ever 
likely to hinder, the main benefits of conjugal society, which 
are solace and peace." When marriage was found to be rather 
an unconquerable hindrance than a help to the true ends of life, 
Milton desired that it might be ended by deliberate consent of 
both husband and wife, religiously, in presence of the church. 
Right or wrong in opinion, Milton wrote this treatise in no 
spirit of bitterness. His last words in it are : " That God the 
Son hath put all other things under His own feet, but His com- 
mandments he hath left all under the feet of Charity." In a 
second pamphlet, published in the next year, 1644, Milton 
supported his case b}^ translating and abridging the like opin- 
ions of Martin Bucer from a book of his on " The Kingdom of 



882 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1600 

Christ," addressed to Edward VI. This pamphlet was ad- 
dressed also to the Parliament, as " The Judgment of Martin 
Bucer concerning Divorce." To these, in the year 1645, he 
added two other pamphlets in reply to objections that had 
been made to his doctrine of divorce: " Tetrad lordon," and 
" Colasterion." And, thus, upon the subject of divorce, also, 
Milton had now said what lie had to sa}\ 

But in 1644, the year in which Milton began his publications 
on that subject, he addressed to the Parliament another writing, 
which is the noblest of his English prose-works : " Areopagitica ; 
a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Libert}' of Vnlicenc'd 
Printing, to the Parlament of England." John Selden had said 
in Parliament, in 1628, " There is no law to prevent the printing 
of any books in England ; only a decree of the Star Chamber." 
But the Long Parliament, which had abolished the Star Cham- 
ber, set up a Committee of Examinations for control of print- 
ers, search for books and pamphlets disapproved by them, and 
seizure of the persons by wdiom such works were published or 
sold; and on the 14th of June, 1643, the Lords and Com- 
mons ordered the publication of their ordinance " for the regu- 
lating of printing, and for suppressing the great late abuses 
and frequent disorders in printing many false, scandalous, sedi- 
tious, libellous, and unlicensed pamphlets, to the great defa- 
mation of religion and government." Milton met this by pub- 
lishing, in November, 1644, a noble protest, as his plea for 
liberty of thought and utterance. 

" Why," lie asked, " should we then affect a rigor contrary to the man- 
ner of God and of Nature, by abridging or scanting those means, which 
books freely permitted are, both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of 
truth." " And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play 
upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing 
and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood 
grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open 
encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing. . . . 
When a man hath bin labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of 
knowledge, hath furnisht out his findings in all their equipage, drawn 
forth his reasons as it were a battel raung'd, scatter'd and defeated all 
objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him 
the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the 
matter by dint of argument, for his opponents then to sculk, to lay 



To A.D. 1650.] JOHN MILTON. 383 

ambusbments, to keep a narrow bridge of licencing where tbe challenger 
should passe, though it be valour enough in shouldiership, is but weaknes 
and cowardise in the wars of Truth. For who knows not that Truth is 
strong next to the Almighty ; she needs no policies, no strategems, no licen- 
cings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that 
error uses against her power." In this little book, Milton uttered nobly 
his own soul and the soul of England on behalf of that free interchange 
of thought which Englishmen, permitted or not, have always practised, 
and by which they have labored safely forward as a nation. 

Milton published also, in 1644, his short letter on "Educa- 
tion," addressed to Samuel Hartlib. 

In 1645, Milton's wife, alarmed by the probability that he 
would put into practice his theor}' of divorce, returned to him, 
and was forgiven; and for the subsequent four } T ears, Milton 
took no part in public controversies. He was living the life 
of a quiet scholar, and was writing his "History of Britain," 
when the execution of Charles I., Jan. 30, 1649, raised, not 
only before England, but before the civilized world, questions 
in the discussion of which Milton's learning, and logic, and 
eloquence were needed. Within a month after the death of the 
king, Milton published his u Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," 
which he began to write during the struggle between the 
Presbyterians and Independents. The Presbyterians brought 
Charles to the block, and the Independents executed him. The 
l > resb3*terians sought mastery over the Independents lry separat- 
ing themselves from the act. As a Royalist said, their grief 
was " that the head was not struck off to the best advantage 
and commodity of them that held it by the hair." Since the 
deed was done. Milton's desire was that it should not have been 
done in vain, but that it should be held to signify what was for 
him the central truth of the great struggle ; that the chief 
magistrate of a nation, whatever he be called, has no power to 
dispense with laws which are the birthright of the people ; that 
he is bound to govern in accordance with them, is himself under 
them, and answerable for the breach of them. Milton sought 
to give to so momentous an act its true interpretation, as a 
violent expression of the principle towards which the question 
of the limit of authority was tending, the principle that, forty 
years later, was to be finally established at the Revolution. 



884 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D, 1600. 

This principle, the essence of the struggle, was what Milton 
kept in mind, and for this, throughout his prose-writing under 
the Commonwealth, he sought chiefly to win assent from wise 
and simple. He "wrote nothing," he said in a later book. 
"respecting the regal jurisdiction, till the king, proclaimed an 
enenry by the Senate, and overcome in amis, was brought cap- 
tive to his trial and condemned to suffer death. . . . Neither 
did I then direct my argument or persuasion personally against 
Charles ; but, by the testimony of many of the most eminent 
divines, I proved what course of conduct might lawfully be 
observed towards tyrants in general. . . . This work was not 
published till after the death of the king : and was written 
rather to tranquillize the minds of men than to discuss any 
part of the question respecting Charles, a question the decision 
of which belonged to the magistrates, and not to me. and which 
had now received its final determination." 

Early in 1649. Milton also published " Observations upon 
the Articles of Peace with the Irish. Rebels." 

These two works had been published, when the Council of 
State called upon Milton to write an answer to '• Eikon Basi- 
like," which was producing a powerful impression on the 
public. Later in the same year, Milton's answer came, 
entitled " Eikonoklastes." In his preface Milton said, "I 
take it on me as a work assign'd rather than by me chosen 
or affected, which was the cause both of beginning it so late, 
and finishing it so leisurely in the midst of other employments 
and diversions." He treated the book as the king's, and said, 
" As to the author of these soliloquies, whether it were undoubt- 
edly the late king, as is vulgarly believ'd. or any secret coad- 
jutor, and some stick not to name him, it can add nothing, nor 
shall take from the weight, if any be. of reason which he brings." 
It was a time for forbearance, but if the king left this new 
appeal behind him to truth and the world, the adversaries of 
his cause were compelled k, to meet the force of his reason in 
any field whatsoever, the force and equipage of whose arms 
they have so often met victoriously." Milton accordingly 
replied, section by section, to each of the twenty-eight parts 
of the " Eikon Basilike." 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH 
CENTURY. 



John Milton. 
Edmund Waller . 
Abraham Cowley. 
Henry Vaughan. 
Sir William Davenant. 



Samuel Butler. 
Andrew Marvell. 
Samuel Pordage. 



Sir William Davenant. 
Thomas Killigrew- 
Sir Charles Sedley. 
Duke of Buckinghim. 
Sir George Etherege. 
Thomas Shadwell. 
Elkanah Settle. 



Thomas Rymer. 



POETS. 

Earl of Roscommon. 
Earl of Dorset. 
Earl of Mulgrave. 
Catherine Philips. 
Nahum Tate. 

SATIRISTS. 

Earl of Rochester. 
John Oldham. 
Sir Samuel Garth. 

DRAMATISTS. 

John Crowne. 
Nathaniel Lee. 
Thomas Otway. 
Aphra Behn. 
Sir Robert Howard. 
Edward Howard. 
Thomas D'Urfey. 

CRITICS. 

I William Walsh. 



George Stepney. 
Thomas Creech. 
Richard Duke. 
John Pomfret. 
John Dryden. 



William King. 
Thomas Brown. 
John Dryden. 



William Wycherley. 
William Congreve. 
Sir John Vanbrugh. 
George Farquhar. 
Thomas Southern. 
George Granville. 
John Dryden. 



I John Dryden. 



SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 



Thomas Hobbes. 
James Harrington. 
Robert Boyle. 
Robert Hooke. 
John Ray. 
Thomas Sprat. 



Thomas Sydenham. 
Sir Thomas Browne. 
Elias Ashmole. 
Sir Kenelm Digby. 
Sir Isaac Newton. 
I Thomas Mun. 



Sir Josiah Child. 
Sir William Petty. 
Algernon Sidney. 
Izaak Walton. 
Ralph Cudworth. 
John Locke. 



HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS, DIARISTS, AND 
ESSAYISTS. 



Lord Clarendon. 
Samuel Pepys. 
John Aubrey. 
Anthony a Wood. 
Gilbert Burnet. 



Roger North. 
John Strype. 
Humphrey Prideaux. 
John Evelyn. 
Sir William Temple. 



Marchmont Needham. 
Sir Roger L'Estrange. 
Jeremy Collier. 
Gerard Langbaine. 



THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS WRITERS. 



John Bunyan. 
Richard Baxter. 
John Howe. 
George Fox. 
Robert Barclay. 
William Penn. 



Sir George Mackenzie. 
Isaac Barrow. 
John Tillotsoa. 
Robert Leighton. 
William Beveridge. 
Samuel Parker. 



Thomas Ken. 
George Morley. 
William Sherlock. 
Robert South. 
Edward Stillingfleet. 
Thomas Tenison. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 
POETS, WITS, AND DRAMATISTS. 

1. John Milton; his Life and Writings from the Tear 1650. — 2. Beginning of the 
Era of French Literary Influence in England. — 3. The New Criticism ; Thomas 
Kymer. — 4. Edmund Waller.— 5. Abraham Cowley; Henry Yaughan. — 6. 
Samuel Butler. — 7. Andrew Marvel. — 8. Sir William Davenant. — 9. Dryden's 
Earlier Contemporaries. — 10. Thomas Killigrew; Sir Charles Sedley. — 11. 
Buckingham. — 12. Dorset; Bochester. — 13. Boscoinmon. — 14. Mulgrave. — 
15. Thomas D'Urfey. — 16. Sir George Etherege. — 17. Samuel Pordage. — 18. 
Thomas Shad well. — 19. Elkanah Settle. — 20. John Crowne. — 21. Nathaniel 
Lee. — 22. Thomas Otway. — 23. Aphra Behn. — 24. Catherine Philips. — 25. 
John Dryden's Life and Writings. — 26. Dryden's Later Contemporaries; 
William Wycherley. — 27. William Congreve. — 28. John Vanbrugh. — 29. 
George Farquhar. — 30. Thomas Southern. — 31. John Oldham. — 32. Nahum 
Tate. — 33. George Stepney. — 34. Thomas Creech; Bichard Duke. — 35. Samuel 
Garth. — 36. John Pomfret; William Walsh; William King; Thomas Brown; 
George Granville. 

1. Milton had been appointed Foreign Secretaiy to the 
Council of the Commonwealth, when, late in the year 1649, 
appeared a book, written in Latin, with the ro}~al arms of Eng- 
land on its title-page, and entitled " Salmasius's Royal Defence 
of Charles I., addressed to his legitimate heir, Charles II." 
The author was Claude Salmasius, one of the most renowned 
seholars in Europe ; and his book was an artful and powerful 
arraignment of the people of England for the crime of murder- 
ing their king. 

Milton was called upon bj T the Council of State to reply to 
Salmasius. His health was already weak, the sight of his left 
eye already gone, and he was told he would lose his ej-esight 
altogether if he undertook this labor. But to maintain before 
Europe in Latin, as he had maintained before his countiymen 
in English, what was for him, and, as he believed, for England, 
the living truth involved in the great struggle, with all its pas- 
sions and misdeeds, was the next duty in his intellectual war. 

387 



388 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

Milton wrote his " Defence of the People of England," and the 
sight of the remaining e} T e then gradually vanished. Yet he 
said, in a sonnet to his old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, — for Milton 
loved alike those who had taught him and those whom he had 
taught, — 

" Yet I argue not 

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor hate a jot 

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer 

Eight onward. What supports me, dost thou ask ? 

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied 

In Liberty's defence, my noble task, 

Of which all Europe rings from side to side. 

This thought might lead me through the world's vain masque, 

Content, though blind, had I no better guide." 

His " Defence for the People of England " was published early 
in 1651, and is, above all things, Milton's argument for the 
responsibility of kings against the theory of their divine right 
to an absolute command over their subjects. Salmasius said, 
44 As to the pretended pact between a king and his subjects, cer- 
tainly there is none in kingdoms born of force of arms, as al- 
most all existing kingdoms are;" and he thought it simply 
ridiculous to say, as the English did, that a king was the minis- 
ter and servant of his people, and waged not his own wars, but 
theirs. Milton wrote to convince the man}* and the few. To 
the thinkers the great body of argument was addressed ; for 
them he appealed out of his own highest nature to their highest 
sense of right ; but he satisfied the many, too, by blending with 
his answer vigorous combat of the kind that alone would win at- 
tention from the thoughtless. He not only cast back the con- 
tumelies of Salmasius against the English people, but scorned 
an aclvocacy that, upon a question of the welfare of humanity, 
was on a vital point, not what the writer thought, but what he 
had agreed to say. He trusted still to the fair battle of thought. 
At the end of the preface to his reply he said , - ' And I would 
entreat the illustrious States of Holland to take off their prohi- 
bition, and suffer the book to be publicly sold ; for when I 
have detected the vanity, ignorance, and falsehood that it is 
full of, the farther it spreads the more effectually it will be sup- 
pressed." In the noble close to his -- Defence," Milton urged on 



ToA.D. 1700.] JOHN MILTON. 389 

the people of England that the}- must themselves refute their 
adversary, b}' a constant endeavor to outdo all men's bad words 
with their own good deeds. God had heard their prayers, but 
now, he said, you must show u as great justice, temperance, 
and moderation in the maintaining your liberty as you have 
shown courage in freeing yourselves from slavery." 

This book first gave to Milton European reputation, and was 
commonly regarded as a complete victory over Salmasius. But 
in the next year, 1652, appeared 4k The Cry of Royal Blood to 
Heaven against the English Parricides," reputed to have been 
written by one Alexander Morns, a Scotch divine of doubtful 
character, actually written by one Pierre Dumoulin, a French- 
man, who was afterwards made prebendary of Canterbury. 
Salmasius, who had avowed his purpose of replying to Milton, 
died in 1653. 

Milton's rejoinder to this second attack forms his '* Second 
Defence for the People of England," published in 1654. He 
calls Cromwell " father of his country," and earnestly admon- 
ishes him that his countiy has intrusted to his hands her freedom. 
In the duties before him there are, said Milton, difficulties to 
which those of war are child's pla\\ He must not suffer that 
liberty for which he encountered so many perils to sustain any 
violence at his own hands, or any from those of others ; and he 
must look for counsel to men who had shared his dangers, "men 
of the utmost moderation, integrity, and valor ; not rendered 
savage or austere bj- the sight of so much bloodshed and of so 
man}' forms of death ; but inclined to justice, to the reverence 
of the Deity, to a sj'nipathy with human suffering, and ani- 
mated for the preservation of liberty with a zeal strengthened 
by the hazards which for its sake they have encountered." Of 
his countrymen during the struggle they had gone through, Mil- 
ton says here: "No illusions of glory, no extravagant emula- 
tion of the ancients, influenced them with a thirst for ideal lib- 
erty ; but the rectitude of their lives and the sobriety of their 
habits taught them the only true and safe road to real liberty ; 
and they took up arms only to defend the sanctity of the laws 
and the rights of conscience." Of himself he says: "No one 
ever knew me either soliciting any thing nryself or through my 



390 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

friends. T usually kept myself secluded at home, where rcry 
own property, part of which had been withheld during the civil 
commotions, and part of which had been absorbed in the op- 
pressive contributions which I had to sustain, afforded me a 
scanty subsistence." 

In 1654, gradual loss of sight in the remaining eye ended in 
Milton's complete blindness. The disease was not in the ejes 
themselves, which remained unimpaired, but in the nerve of 
sight ; its exciting cause was exhaustion of nervous power by 
excessive use of his c} T es in study from childhood. 

The Commonwealth, held together b}- the might of Cromwell, 
fell after his death. His amiable son Richard called a Parlia- 
ment which vanished before the power of the army, and Rich- 
ard Cromwell passed from the Protectorate to private life. He 
lived to see the Revolution, and he died a eountiy gentleman 
in 1712. The attempt to revive the Long Parliament as a cen- 
tral authority failed also to restrain the army. George Monk 
marched out of Scotland to subdue, as he said, the military 
t}Tanny in England, but it was soon evident that there was 
no hopeful way jout of the discord but a restoration of the 
monarchy. 

In these days John Milton, first fearing predominance of 
the Presbyterians, had addressed to the Parliament called by 
Richard Cromwell " A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical 
Causes," showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth 
to compel in matters of religion. To the revived Long Parlia- 
ment, which succeeded the short-lived Parliament called by 
Richard Cromwell, Milton addressed "Considerations touching 
the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church," 
in which he argued that each pastor should be maintained by 
his own flock. On the 20th of October, 1659, Milton wrote " A 
Letter to "a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Common- 
wealth." A few months later he published a pamphlet called 
"The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Common- 
wealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the Incon- 
veniences and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in this Nation." 
He urged, to the last moment of hope, the first principles of 
what he said is not called amiss "the good old cause;" 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN MILTON. 391 

adding, " Thus much I should perhaps have said, though I was 
sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had 
none to cry to but, with the prophet, * Earth, Earth, 
Earth ! ' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse in- 
habitants are deaf to. Nay, though what J have spoke should 
happen (which Thou suffer not who didst create mankind 
free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being ser- 
vants of men !) to be the last words of our expiring lib- 
erty." 

At the "Restoration, in 1660, Milton withdrew from danger to 
a friend's house in Bartholomew Close, while his prosecution 
was voted by the Commons, and his " Iconoclastes " and " De- 
fence of the People of England " were ordered to be burnt by 
the hangman It is said that his brother poet, Sir William 
Davenant, a Royalist, who had been befriended by Milton in 
Cromwell's time, now saved Milton from being placed among 
the exceptions to the Act of Oblivion passed on the 30th of 
August. Milton was nevertheless arrested ; but his release was 
ordered by the House of Commons on the loth of December, 
and he appealed against the excessive fees charged for his im- 
prisonment. For about a 3 T ear he lived in Holborn, near Red 
Lion Square. In 1662 he was in Jewin Street ; and subsequently 
he removed to a small house in Artillery Walk, by Bunhill Fields, 
his home for the rest of his life. In 1662, he married for the 
third time. His first wife, Mary Powell, had died, probably in 
1652, leaving him three daughters. He had married a second 
time in 1656 ; but this marriage, which was a happy one, had 
ended after a duration of fifteen months, by the death of the 
wife. At the time of his third marriage, Milton was fifty-four 
years of age ; his wife was about twenty ; his eldest daugh- 
ter, Anne, was sixteen ; his second daughter, Mary, was fif- 
teen ; and Deborah, his }'oungest, ten. Milton's home life was 
simple. He rose at four in summer, five in winter, heard a 
chapter of the Hebrew Bible, and was left till seven in medita- 
tion. After breakfast he listened to reading and dictated till 
noon. From twelve to one he walked, or took exercise in a 
swing. At one he dined ; then until six he was occupied with 
music, books, and composition. From six to eight he gave to 



392 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

social chat with friends who came to visit him. His 3*oungest 
uaughter, Deborah, said of Milton, man}* years after his death, 
tl that he was delightful company; the life of the conversation, 
no*t only on account of his flow of subject, but of his unaffect- 
ed cheerfulness and civility. " At eight Milton supped, then 
smoked a pipe, and went to bed at nine. 

One of those who read to him was a young Quaker, Thomas 
Ellwood, "The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood . . . 
Written by his Own Hand," is a most interesting record of 
personal incidents in the reign of Charles II. Ellwood says 
that during the plague, in 1665, Milton took a house in the 
country, at Chalfont St. Giles, where one daj* the young 
Quaker paid him a visit. " After some common discourses had 
passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his, which, 
being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home 
with me and read it at my leisure, and when I had so done 
return it to him with my judgment thereupon. When I came 
home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excel- 
lent poem which he entitled -Paradise Lost.* After I had, 
with the best attention, read it through, I made him another 
visit, and returned him his book, with due acknowledgment of 
the favor he had done me in communicating it to me. He 
asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I 
modestly but freely told him ; and, after some further discourse 
about it, I pleasantly said to him, * Thou hast said much here 
of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found ? ' 
He made me no answer, but sat some time in a muse ; then brake 
off that discourse, and fell upon another subject. After the 
sickness was over, and the city well cleansed and become safely 
habitable again, he returned thither. And when afterwards I 
went to wait on him there (which I seldom failed of doing 
whenever my occasions drew me to London), he showed me 
his second poem, called 'Paradise Regained,' and in a pleas- 
ant tone said to me, * This is owing to 3*011 ; for 3*011 put it into 
my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which be- 
fore I had not thought of.' " It is still the same John Milton, 
sociable and kindly to the last. " Paradise Lost," then, was 
finished before the end of 1665; and "Paradise Regained" 



To A. D. 1700.] JOHN MILTON. 393 

probably was written before April 27, 1667, the date of Mil- 
ton's agreement with Samuel Simmons to sell him the copy- 
right of " Paradise Lost " for five pounds, with conditional 
payment of another five pounds when thirteen hundred copies 
had been sold, and of another five pounds after the sale of 
thirteen hundred copies of the second edition, and of the third 
— each edition to be of not more than fifteen hundred. Milton 
received altogether in his lifetime ten pounds for " Paradise 
Lost ; " and his widow received eight pounds for her remaining 
interest in the cop\Tight. The poem, divided at first into ten 
books, was well printed in a little quarto volume, price three 
shillings. It was without preface or note of any kind, and had 
no " Arguments " before the books. It was simply u Paradise 
Lost: a Poem written in Ten Books by John Milton," and 
published in 1667. 

Dryden was among the visitors of the companionable poet in 
his later } T ears ; and in the preface to his ''Fables," Dryden 
wrote: "Milton is the poetical son of Spenser. Milton has 
confessed to me that Spenser was his original." Spenser and 
Milton, indeed, have a distinct relation to each other as com- 
batants on the same side in the same battle at two different 
points. Each, with his own marked individuality, expressed 
also, as a representative Englishman, the life of his own time. 
Different as their two great poems are in form and structure, 
there is likeness in the difference; for the "Faery Queen," 
in which all qualities of mind and soul are striving heavenward, 
was a religious allegoiy on the ways of men to God. " Para- 
dise Lost " was designed to approach the national religion from 
the other side, and show the relation, justify the waj's, of God 
to men. Milton furnished his epic with sublime machinery, 
after the manner of Homer and Virgil, by taking from the 
Fathers of the church the doctrine of angels and archangels, 
and the stoiy of the fall of Lucifer, which had from old time 
been associated with the Scripture narrative. The use of this 
machinery, and that of the archangels, enabled Milton to place 
Adam on earth between the powers of heaven and hell, and 
represent the contest vividly to the imagination. To represent 
the unseen by new combinations of the seen was inevitable. It 



394 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

is simply impossible to describe that of which no man has ever 
had experience on earth. Therefore Raphael tells Adam : 

" What surmounts the reach 
Of human sense I shall delineate so, 
By likening spiritual to corporal forms, 
As may express them best ; though what if earth 
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
^ach to other like, more than on earth is thought ?" 

Milton's poetr} T shows deep traces of his study of Plato ; and 
this last question enables the mind of the reader to pass from 
admission that new combinations of the known must represent 
the unknown, through philosophic thought, into a livelier ac- 
ceptance of the narrative so prefaced. 

The poem, as we now have it in twelve books, falls naturally 
into three equal parts. We begin in the midst of the story. In 
the first four books, Heaven, Earth, and Hell are opened to the 
imagination, and man is placed at his creation between the 
contending powers of good and evil. The next four books 
contain Raphael's narrative of the Past, through which we 
learn the events that concerned man before Adam was created. 
In the last four books we have the Fall and its consequence, 
with Michael's vision of the Future. This includes the Re- 
demption of Man, and the whole dealing of God with him 
through Christ : 

" Now amplier known, thy Saviour and thy Lord: 
Last, in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed 
In glory of the Father, to dissolve 
Satan with his perverted world; then raise 
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, 
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date, 
Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love ; 
To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss." 

" Paradise Lost " is not to be judged prosaically by the standard 
of each reader's personal opinion on points of faith. It is the 
religion of its time, intensely Biblical, and deals only with great 
features of national theology. Milton's chief argument for 
divine justice is in answer to the questions: "Why was man 
permitted to fall?" and, "Man having fallen, how has God 
dealt with him? " The answer to the first question came from 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN MILTON. 395 

Milton's soul : God made man free. Man made a wrong use of 
his freedom ; but had he been formed capable only of choosing 
one of two courses, he would have had no choice, no liberty, no 
use of reason. The spirit of Milton's answer to the second 
question is expressed in the words of Adam : 

"O goodness infinite, goodness immense! 
That all this good of evil shall produce, 
And evil turn to good ; more wonderful 
Than that which by creation first brought forth 
Light out of darkness ! Full of doubt I stand, 
Whether I should repent me now of sin 
By me done and occasion'd; or rejoice 
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring; 
To God more glory, more good-will to men 
From God, and over wrath Grace shall abound." 

Not unwilling to dwell on this theme, Milton, in the four 
books of "Paradise Regained," represented in another form 
the contest of Christ with the Power of Evil, by taking for his 
subject the Temptation in the Wilderness. But this is no 
sequel to "Paradise Lost," which, including the whole reach 
of time, began and ended in infinity. The reader whose form 
of religion is not Milton's may find its spirit at the heart of 
"Paradise Lost" in the predominant conviction that God is 
supreme in wisdom and beneficence, and the resolve to draw 
for himself and his countiymen this truth of truths out of the 
national theolog}'. "Paradise Lost" repays long and close 
study of the distribution of its parts, the subtle skill of its 
transitions, the blending of sweet echoes from the noblest 
wisdom of the past with the fresh thought of a poet who can 
approach the Mount of God, hymning His praise, can make the 
hollow deep resound with bold defiance of Omnipotence, can 
sing with tender grace of Eve in Paradise, and out of his own 
innocence can speak her purhVy. Milton's precision in the use 
of words, conspicuous in his early poems, fills " Paradise Lost " 
with subtle delicacies of expression. Thus, when it is asked 
in hell who shall cross the dark unbottomecl infinite ab3 T ss to the 

new world, 

" Upborne with indefatigable wings 
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive 
The liappy isle ; " 



396 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

familiar as we are with books in which we had better not look 
at each word with all our understanding, we may not stay to 
observe that ' ' arrive ' ' strictly means ' ' come to the shores of. ' ' 
So Chaucer said of his Knight : 

" In the greete see 
At many a noble arrive hadde he be." 

Among passages in " Paradise Lost " interesting for their rela- 
tion to the life and times of Milton are the reference to his 
blindness in the opening of Bk. III., 11. 1-55 ; the reference to 
hirelings in Bk. IV., 11. 183-193 ; and the reference to the evil 
days on which he had fallen, in Bk. VII., 11. 1-39. 

In 1674, seven } T ears after its first publication, Milton pub- 
lished the second edition of "Paradise Lost," almost without 
change beyond the placing of the Arguments before the books, 
and changing the number of the books from ten to twelve, by 
dividing what had been the seventh and tenth books into those 
which are now the seventh and eighth, eleventh and twelfth. 
There is all the grace of his youth in Milton's manner of intro- 
ducing these new breaks. Raphael's narrative of the seven 
days of creation is in the seventh book. In the first edition 
the discourse now in the eighth book followed without break, 
the lines running together thus : 

" If else thou seek'st 
Aught not surpassing human measure, say. 
To whom thus Adam gratefully replied." 

Milton did not make his break by simply writing u Book 
VIII.," but made a poet's pause by this fresh opening : 

"The angel ended, and in Adam's ear 
So charming left his voice, that he awhile 
Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear; 
Then, as new wak'd, thus gratefully replied." 

The first five lines of Book XII. were added for the same 
good reason. 

In November of the same year in which he brought out the 
second edition of " Paradise Lost," Milton died, aged sixty-six. 
Three years before that, in 1671, while the town was being 



ToA.D. 1700.] JOIIX MILTOX. 397 

amused by the buffooneries of the stage, lie published not only 
'•Paradise Regained," but his austere and noble drama, 
"Samson Agonistes." There is a double sense in the word 
Agonistes. It may mean a stirrer in actual contest, or a 
striver in games for the amusement of the people. Samson 
was both. Milton, at last working out his early notion of a 
sacred drama moulded on those of the Greek tragedians, took 
for his theme Samson as a type of the maintainers of what 
Milton knew as "the good old cause" in England. Their 
party was now as Samson, blind, powerless, the scorn of the 
Philistines of Charles II. 's court. Samson was called to make 
them sport, was for them Agonistes in the second sense, while 
for himself and God true striver; and he would yet prevail, 
Although the mockers had the mastery to-day, God was not 
mocked. The drama closely followed the Greek model, even 
in the construction of its choruses, which had only a few 
rhymes interspersed among their carefully constructed metres. 
In nearly all the poetry of this last period of Milton's life, the 
grandeur of the poet's thought and his supreme skill in the use of 
language caused him almost wholly to put aside the ornaments 
of rhyme — '• invention," as he now called it, "of a barbarous 
age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre." Samson's 
lament for his blindness (11. 67-109) could, of course, be 
realized by the blind poet. He blended with his argument a 
thought of his own temperate life ending in pains of gout, the 
scourge of the luxurious, when the chorus gave dramatic ex- 
pression (11. 667-709) to the question of God's dealings with 
the nation and with many a true Agonistes of the Common- 
wealth ; not 

''Heads without name no more remember' d, 
But such as thou hast solemnly elected, 
With gifts and graces eminently adorn'd, 
To some great work, thy glory, 
And people's safety, which in part they effect; 
Yet toward these thus dignified, thou oft 
Amidst their highth of noon 

Changest thy countenance, and thy hand, with no regard 
Of highest favors past 
From thee on them, or them to thee of service." 



398 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

They are left open to the hostile sword, 

" Or else captiv'd, 
Or to tli' unjust tribunals under change of times, 
And condemnation of th' ungrateful multitude. 
If these they 'scape, perhaps in poverty 
With sickness and disease thou bovv'st them down — 
Painful diseases, and deform' d, 
In crude old age: 

Though not disordinate, yet causeless suffering 
The punishment of dissolute days." 

But the doubt is expressed only like the doubt in L} T cidas : 

'.* Were it not better done as others use, 
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade? " 

expressed, because the answer is to follow in the last lines of 
the play. And they were Milton's last words as a poet : 

" All is best, though we oft doubt 
What the unsearchable dispose 
Of Highest Wisdom brings about, 
And ever best found in the close. 
Oft He seems to hide his face, 
But unexpectedly returns; 
And to his faithful champion hath in place 
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns, 
And all that band them to resist 
His uncontrollable intent: 
His servants He, with new acquis! 
Of true experience from this great event, 
With peace and consolation hath dismiss'*!, 
And calm of mind, all passion spent." 

In 1673, the year before his death, there was a second and 
enlarged edition — only the second edition — twenty-eight years 
after the first, of Milton's '• Poems both Latin and English." 
In the same year he published one more prose tract upon a 
question of the day, "Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, and 
Toleration." The Duke of York, heir to the throne, was a 
Roman Catholic. Protestant England looked with dread to 
his succession, and the argument over Catholicism was again 
active. Milton pleaded still for perfect libert}' of conscience, 
but held that the Roman Catholics, by maintaining a foreign 
despotism that weighed alike on civil and religious liberty, shut 



To A.D. 1700.] FRENCH INFLUENCE. 399 

themselves out from a full toleration. He would not have civil 
penalties inflicted on them, but he shared the common dread of 
their predominance, and wished to restrain them where that 
could be done without deling them what they thought neces- 
sary to salvation. 

2. Upon the death of Milton, " the great Elizabethan age of 
imaginative poetry" had said its last word ; and full}' fourteen 
years before his death, the spirit of literature had undergone 
a total change in England. With the Restoration of Charles 
II. begins the period of French influence upon English litera- 
ture, — an influence that was not effectually broken until the 
time of the French Revolution, one hundred and thirty years 
afterward. The literary influence of France, we should have 
felt sooner if we had been less intent upon our own affairs 
during the civil wars and Commonwealth ; for the foundations 
of it were laid while Charles I. was our king. Precisely what 
was the literary influence of France upon England ma}* be best 
gathered from a glance at Boileau's " Art of Poetry " (" L'Art 
Poetique "), in which, though it did not appear until 1G72, are 
expressed the genius and the limitations of French literature at 
this time. Its four cantos embodied the main doctrine of 
Boileau, the Poet of Good Sense. In idea and execution it 
was inspired by Horace's " Art of Poetry; " but its polished 
maxims, applied specially to French poetry, are more system- 
atically arranged. The order of its cantos is: — 1. General 
rules, with a short digression on the history of French poetry 
from Villon to Malherbe. 2. Rules and characteristics of the 
eclogue, elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, balade, madrigal, satire, 
and vaudeville. 3. Rules of tragedy, corned}*, and epic. 4. 
General advice to poets on the use of their powers ; choice of a 
critic ; origin, rise, and decline of poetry ; praise of Louis XIV. 
The critical shortcomings of this work, which may be said to 
have given the law for some years to French and English 
literature, nearly all proceed from a wholesome but too servile 
regard for the example of the ancient classic writers. The 
chief authors of Greece and Rome were to be as much the 
models of good literature as the Latin language was a standard 
of right speech. This led, indeed, to a sound contempt of 



400 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

empt}^ trivialities, but it left the critic with faint powers of rec- 
ognition for a Dante, a Shakespeare, or a Milton. Boileau 
was even hindered by it from perceiving how far Terence was 
surpassed by his friend Moliere. His discipline thus tended 
obviously to the creation of an artificial taste for forms of cor- 
rect writing, excellent in themselves, but as means of perfect 
expression better suited to the genius of the French than of 
the English people. He was a true Frenchman, and English 
writers erred by imitation even of his excellence, in adopting 
too readily for a nation Germanic in origin and language forms 
that harmonized better with the mind and language of a Latin 
race. But, at the same time, they shared with their neighbors 
the benefit of assent to the appeal in his " L'Art Poetique " on 
behalf of plain good sense against the faded extravagances of 
that period of Italian influence from which life and health had 
departed : 

" Evitons ces exces. Laissons a l'ltalie 

De tous ces faux brillants l'eclatante folie. 

Tout doit tendre au Bon Sens." 

These lines declare the living spirit of the poem, in which, if 
we are to see only in one foremost work the altered temper of a 
generation, it may especially be said that the period of Italian 
influence ended, and French influence became supreme. 

3. We are now, therefore, to find in English literature a rising 
race of critics who test every thing b}^ Latin forms. The Eng- 
lish must be, for dignity, as Latin as possible in structure, be- 
cause so the French had determined. That was obedience to 
them in the letter, not in the spirit. In origin and structure, 
their language was chiefly Latin : the} T , therefore, other things 
being equal, preferred words of Latin origin. In origin and 
structure, our language is Teutonic ; and had we really followed 
French example, we should, other things being equal, have pre- 
ferred words of Teutonic origin. Critics now abounded in 
France, and an era of criticism, rather than of creation, was 
about to begin in England. 

One of these new English critics was Thomas Rymer, born about 
1638, educated at Cambridge and at Gray's Inn, who applied French 
laws to Englisli literature, by publishing, early in 1G7S, "The Trage- 



ToA.D. 1700.] EDMUKD WALLER. 401 

dies of the Last Age Consider' d and Examin'd by the Practice of 
the Ancients, and \>y the Common Sense of all Ages. In a Letter to 
Fleetwood Shepheard, Esq." The plays here suggested for criticism 
were Beaumont and Fletchers "Rollo," "King and No King," and 
"Maid's Tragedy;" Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Julius Caesar;" 
and Ben Jonson's " Catiline." But Ryiner brought his letter to an end 
when he had criticised the three plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, and 
summed up with this opinion of the noblest epoch of dramatic literature 
in the world's history: "I have thought our poetry of the last age as 
rude as our architecture; one cause thereof might be, that Aristotle's 
treatise of poetry has been so little studied amongst us." Mr. Rymer 
reserved the discussion of the other plays, and said, "With the remain- 
ing tragedies I shall also send you some reflections on that 'Paradise 
Lost' of Milton's which some are pleas'd to call a poem, and assert rime 
against the slender sophistry wherewith he attacques it." Mr. Rymer 
called the poetry of times before the French influence came in " rude as 
our architecture." The new polite taste condemned also Gothic archi- 
tecture, because it was not based on Greek or Roman models. St. 
Paul's Cathedral, at this time being rebuilt after the fire of London, is 
our noblest result of the classical Renaissance that in architecture began 
in the time of Charles L, and had Inigo Jones for its leader. 

4. Upon passing into the Second Half of the Seventeenth 
Century we meet with several poets, who, like Milton, were but 
continuing literary labors which they had entered upon during 
the first half of that century. The most notable of these poets 
are Waller, Cowley, Butler, Marvell, and Davenant. 

Edmund Waller was born in 1G05, at Coleshill, Herts. 
His father died in his infancy, and left him an income of thirty- 
five hundred pounds a year ; say, ten thousand in present value. 
His mother was John Hampden's sister. He was educated at 
Eton and Cambridge, entered Parliament when young, and soon 
became known at court as a poet. He added to his wealth by 
marrying a city heiress, who died in 1630, leaving Waller a 
gay courtier of five and twenty, writing verse-worship of the 
Earl of Leicester's eldest daughter, Lady Dorothea Sidney, as 
Sacharissa, and of another lad}' of the court, perhaps Lady 
Sophia Murray, as Amoret. The lad}' whom he took as second 
wife has no place in his verses. In the civil wars, Waller at 
first took part with his kinsman Hampden ; but he opposed aboli- 
tion of Episcopacy, showed good will to the king, spoke freely 
iu the Parliament, — by which he was sent, in 1642, as one of 



40:2 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1C50 



the commissioners to the king at Oxford. — and. in 1643. 
plotted against it. He saved himself ignobly, and escaped, 
after a year's imprisonment, with a fine of ten thousand pounds 
and exile to France, where he lived chiefly at Rouen. He 
returned to England about 1653. and was received into favor 
by Cromwell, to whom the poet addressed a " Panegyric/' On 
the return of Charles, he adapted himself with equal facility to 
the new order of things : wrote verses of welcome to the king : 
and in his love-songs and occasional work for the stage yielded 
easily to the shallow and ignoble fashions of the time. He died 
in 1687. aged eighty-two : and had then, and fur a good while 
afterwards, a preposterous reputation as "the first refiner of 
English poetry." 

5. Abraham Cowley was born in 1618, after the death 
of his father, who was a grocer in Eondon. His mother, who 
lived to be eighty, struggled to educate him well : and he got his 
first impulse to poetry as a child from Spenser, whose works lay 
in his mother's parlor. His mother got him into Westminster 
School, where he wrote a pastoral comedy called " Love's 
Riddle ; " and in his fifteenth year (in 1633) appeared Cowley's 
** Poetical Blossoms." with a portrait of the author at the age 
of thirteen, and including • • The Tragical History of Pyramus 
and Thisbe." written at the age of ten. and •■Constantia and 
Philetus." written at the age of twelve. In 1636 he went to 
Cambridge. In 1633 the play of • -Love's Riddle." written at 
school, was published ; and in 1639 a Latin comedy. ••Xaufra- 
gium Joculare." acted at Trinity College in that year. At the 
beginning of the civil war. Cowley's play of " The Guardian " 
was acted before the prince as he passed through Cambridge. 
In 1643. Abraham Cowley. M.A., ejected from Cambridge, went 
to St. John's College. Oxford, and wrote satire against the 
Puritans. He went afterwards with the queen to Paris, and 
was employed in ciphering and deciphering letters between her 
and the king. His love-poems appeared in 1647. under the 
title of "The Mistress." They are musical, ingenious, and 
free in tone, but strictly works of imagination. It is said that 
Cowley was in love but once, and that he was then too shy to 
tell his passion. He remained in France till 1656. and then 



ToA.D. 1700.] ABRAHAM COWLEY. 403 

returned to England, was taken prisoner by messengers in 
search for another man, and released upon security given for 
him by a friend. He remained quietly in London till the death 
of Cromwell ; published in 1656, in folio, the first edition of his 
" Works," declaring in the preface that his desire had been 
for some 3-ears past, and did still vehemently continue, to 
retire himself to some of the American plantations, and for- 
sake this world forever. In 1657 he was made M.D. of Oxford ; 
and with a poet's sense of the charm of science, he devoted 
himself to the study of botany. Dr. Cowley took a lively in- 
terest in the fellowship of men of science, and the best way 
of advancing scientific. knowledge. At the death of Cromwell 
he returned to France, but upon the Restoration he came home 
again. He was neglected 03- the court, and owed his means of 
retirement to the good will of Lord St. Albans, whom he had 
served as secretary, and the Duke of Buckingham. His 
"Cutter of Coleman Street," which was his juvenile pla3 T of 
"The Guardian" in an altered form, was censured as a satire 
upon the king's paity*. He was also guilty of an ode in which 
Brutus was honored, and it is said that a request to the king 
for some recognition of his faithful service to the ro3 T al family 
in its adversity was met by Charles II. with the answer, " Mr. 
Cowl's pardon is his reward." He published in 1662 two 
books in Latin verse " Of Plants," which sang of herbs in 
the manner of the elegies b3 T Ovid and Tibullus. Four other 
books were added : two upon flowers, in the various measures 
of Catullus and Horace ; and two upon trees, in the manner 
of Virgil's " Georgics." The last book is patriotic and politi- 
cal. The British oak, in an assembly of the trees, enlarges 
upon the king's troubles and the beginning of the Dutch War. 
This work, " Plantarum, Libri VI.," was first published complete 
with Cowley's other Latin poems, in 1668. He translated two 
of Pindar's odes, the Second Olympic and the Third Nemean, 
turned into a Pindaric ode the thirt3 T -fourth chapter of Isaiah, 
and wrote odes of his own in the same manner. He had a 
livety fancy and a generous mind, capable of real elevation of 
thought, although for high flight as a poet his wings were too 
much clogged with ornament. He died in Juty, 1667, the year 



404: MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

of the publication of that "Annus Mirabilis " in which the 
writing even of Dryden still had traces of the Later Euphuism. 
But the Pindaric ode, as an imitation from the ancients, became 
one of the recognized forms of verse under the new influence. 
Neither Cowlej' nor any other of these new writers of Pindarics 
came near to Ben Jonson, whose noble "Pindaric Ode on the 
Death of Sir H. Morison " was true to the ancient model. 
But now, if a poet, bound by rale, and condemned to the heroic 
couplet as the safe classical measure, wished for a little liberty 
to be wilful in metre and audacious in thought, he could still be 
polite and classical by taking out his freedom under shadow of 
the name of a Pindaric ode. 

Cowley remained true to his opinions on the great conflict of 
his time ; but he had nothing in common with the intellectual 
foppeiy of the Restoration, or with the course of life at the 
court of Charles II. He passed, therefore, his last seven or 
eight years b} T the Thames, in "calm of mind, all passion spent," 
away from the stir of London, first at Barn-Elms, where he had 
a dangerous fever, and then at Chertse5 T . The wise thoughtful- 
ness of these last }'ears is shown by Cowley's " Essays in Verse 
and Prose." Although he was a man who found much pleasure 
in solitude, and is said often to have left the room when a 
woman entered, he animated these essays with the love of liberty 
in a social form. Solitude meant libert}' to think. " The first 
Minister of State," said Cowley, " has not so much business in 
public as the wise man has in private." The private station, 
not in bonds to poverty nor under the restraints of artificial 
form, was his ideal of a freeman's life : " with so much knowl- 
edge and love of piety and pkilosoplry (that is, of the study of 
God's laws and of his creatures) as maj' afford him matter 
enough never to be idle, though without business ; and never to 
be melancholy, though without sin or vanity." And again : 

" If life should a well-order' d poem be 
(In which he only hits the white 
Who joins true profit with the best delight), 
The more heroic strain let others take, 
Mine the Pindaric way I'll make; 
The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free. 
It shall not keep one settled pace of time, 






To A.D. 1700.] SAMUEL BUTLER. 405 

In the same tune it shall not always chime, 

Nor shall each day just to his neighbor rhyme. 

A thousand liberties it shall dispense, 

And yet shall manage all without offence 

Or to the sweetness of the sound, or greatness of the sense." 

One source of the charm of Cowley's Essays is that they came 
straight from the heart, and that there is this unhry of thought 
in their variety of treatment. Whatever his theme — Libert}', 
or Solitude, or Obscurit} T , or Greatness, or Avarice, or the 
Dangers of an Honest Man in Much Compairy, or the Shortness 
of Life and the Uncertainty of Riches, or Nature in the Fields 
and in the Garden, or if he was only giving verse translation of 
Claudian's " Old Man of Verona," Horace's " Country Mouse," 
or those lines from the second book of Virgil's " Georgics " 
which begin "O fortunatos nimium," or Martial's "Vis fieri 
liber?" — the theme is always one, — Peace in the form 
of life which gives the highest Freedom to fit use of a full 
mind. 

Henry Vaughan (b. 1621; d. 1695) studied at Oxford, and spent 
his life as a physician in Wales. His published writings are " Poems, 
with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished," 1646; "Silex Scintillans," 
1650; "Olor Iscanus," 1651; "The Mount of Olives," 1652; "Flores 
Solitudinis," 1654; and " Thalia Rediviva, The Pastimes and Diversions 
of a Country Muse," 1678. 

6. In excuse for the king's indifference to Cowley, it may be 
said that as there was no possible accord in the vibration of the 
two minds, one could get no tone out of the other. Why, then, 
did Charles also neglect Samuel Butler, who aided the court 
party with lively jest against the Puritans, and was in much 
need of friendly patronage ? Charles shone in shallow mimicry 
of earnest men, and could put all his mind into the telling of an 
idle story ; he enjoyed ridicule of his adversaries, and lie there- 
fore found much to enjoy in " Hudibras." But it was the work 
of a man who labored and read, and who liked work. His 
Majesty liked sauntering through life. He preferred the com- 
pany of Killigrew and men whose jests were idle ; but even 
then he was apt to forget their faces if the}' were a week out 
of his sight, and Butler was too proud to stand in the throng of 
the court suitors. Samuel Butler was born in Februar}', 1612, 



406 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

at Strensham, Worcestershire, the fifth of seven children of a 
small farmer, who had sent him to the college school at Worces- 
ter. He began life as clerk to a justice of the peace, Thomas 
Jefferies, of Earl's Croombe, and he then amused himself with 
music and painting. Probably at this time he compiled in law 
French a complete syllabus of "Coke upon Littleton;" there 
also existed in Butler's handwriting a French Dictionary, com- 
piled and transcribed by him. Afterwards Butler came into 
the service of the Earl of Kent, at Wrest, in Bedfordshire. 
He was then about seventeen. Selden, acting as solicitor and 
steward to the family, erupted Butler to write and translate 
for him. Here Butler had access to books, and must have been 
an active and attentive reader. After several years at Wrest, 
he passed into the service of Sir Samuel Luke, at Wood End, 
or Cople Hoo Farm, three miles from Bedford. Sir Samuel 
Luke was a wealth}' man, justice of the peace, colonel in the 
arm}- of the Parliament, and member for Bedfordshire in the 
Long Parliament. Sir Samuel Luke and his Puritan friends 
seem to have suggested to Butler his burlesque poem ; indeed, 
Butler, in closing the first canto of his first part, indicated Sir 
Samuel Luke in a blank, when he made tfc Hudibras," preparing 
kk to keep the peace 'twixt dog and bear," say : 

" 'Tis sung there is a valiant Mameluke 
In foreign land, yclep'd — 
To whom we have been oft compared 
For person, parts, address, and beard ; 
Both equally reputed stout, 
And in the same Cause both have fought. 
He oft, in such attempts as these, 
Came off with glory and success ; 
Nor will we fail in th' execution 
For want of equal resolution." 

After the Restoration. Butler was made secretary to Lord Car- 
bery, and steward of Ludlow Castle ; for Lord Carbery, Jeremy 
Taylor's friend, had become Lord President of Wales. In 
Ludlow Castle, Butler prepared for the press the first part of 
k - Hudibras," which appeared in 16G2. As a burlesque romance 
it is in the octosyllabic rhyme of our old metrical romances, 
with a frequent use of extra syllables for comic double and 



ToA.D. 1700.] SAMUEL BUTLER. 407 

treble rhymes, like those which have kept alive the name of 
Alexander Ross : 

" There was an ancient sage philosopher 
That had read Alexander Boss over, 
And swore the world, as he could prove, 
Was made of fighting and of love." 

So Butler, at the opening of "Hudibras," spoke of the times 
'• when civic fmy first grew high," 

" And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, 
Was beat with fist instead of a stick." 

So of the stocks, described as a castle : 

" In all the fabric 
You shall not see one stone nor a brick." 

Or the single rhyme could be made wkirnsicallv, as 

" If animal, both of us may 
As justly pass for bears as they; 
For we are animals no less, 
Although of different specieses." 

The form of Butler's mock heroic was influenced by his reading 
of " Don Quixote," whom he quoted now and then. " Don 
Quixote " had been translated by Thomas Shelton, from an 
Italian version, and first published in two quarto volumes, in 
1612 and 1620, afterwards in one folio volume, in 1652. Hudi- 
bras, on a horse clearl}- related to Rosinante, went " a colonel- 
ling " as a Presbyterian Quixote, and had his Sancho in Squire 
Ralpho, through whom Butler caricatured the Independents. 
In the debates between Hudibras and his squire, the points of 
difference between Presbyterians and Independents are touched 
lightly ; and what story there is proceeds, in good romance 
fashion, no faster than Chaucer's " Sir Thopas." But the 
whimsical dialogues, descriptions, and turns of fancy that make 
up the poem, sparkle with keen wit applied incessantlj' to the 
real life and deeper thought of England in its day. The man 
of true genius never spends his energ}- on the mere outward 
fashions of his time. The story of the first part of the poem 
told how Sir Hudibras and Ralpho went forth to make an end 
of a bear-baiting, were drubbed in battle with the folk concerned 



408 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

in the bear-baiting, but were left, \)y the escape of the bear, 
masters of the field and of a one-legged fiddler, whom they 
carried off and put in the stocks. The escaped bear having 
been rescued, his friends came in search of the warriors, beset 
the house of Hudibras, and when he came out with Ralpho 
betimes in the morning, being stirred by a sense of victor} 7 to 
present himself with new hope to a disdainful widow who had 
goods and chattels, he was in trouble again, and finally van- 
quished in single combat by a woman. Trulla then claimed 
his arms, adorned him with her petticoat, caused Hudibras and 
Ralpho to be put in the stocks from which the one-legged fid- 
dler was released. So they were left, Presbyterian and Inde- 
pendent, in high argument together about synods. There was 
no book so popular at court as ' w Hudibras ' ' when it came out. 
The king quoted its couplets ; Lord Clarendon hung Butler's 
portrait on his wall ; it was, as Pepys records, the book most 
in fashion. 

The second part, equally popular, appeared in 1664. Butler 
married, but not mone}\ The king and court did nothing for 
him ; and, according to one account, which has been disputed, 
he was saved from absolute starvation only by the liberality 
of a bencher of the Middle Temple, "William Longueville, 
who at last paid for his funeral. The discredit of this neg- 
lect was felt by other men of genius who were Butler's con- 
temporaries. Drj'den, in asking for unpaid arrears of his 
own sahuy, wrote, "It is enough for one age to have neg- 
lected Mr. Cowley, and starved Mr. Butler." Otwa} T , not long 
before he died in hunger, wrote in the prologue to a plaj T : 

" Tell 'em how Spenser died, how Cowley mourned, 
How Butler's faith and service were returned." 

And Oldham asked, "On Butler, who can think without just 
rage?" After publishing two parts of "Hudibras," Butler 
turned from his labor sick at heart. There was an interval of 
fourteen years, during which he lived in obscurity, before the 
third part appeared, in 1678 ; and he died in September, 1680. 
7. Andrew Marvell, born in November, 1620, was son of 
a clerg} T man who was master of the Grammar School at Kings- 
ton-upon-Hull. He was sent at fourteen to Trinity College, Cam- 



To A.D. 1700. | ANDREW MARVELL. 409 

bridge. He graduated as B.A. in 1G38, and about 1642 went 
abroad, spending four 3-ears in foreign travel. After his return 
lie was at Bilbrough, in Yorkshire, teaching languages to the 
only daughter of Lord Fairfax ; and his first poems were upon 
the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough and upon the House at Nuri- 
Appleton, another seat of Fairfax's, in Yorkshire. In 1653, 
Milton recommended the appointment of Marvell as his assist- 
ant secretaiy, but at that time without success. He described 
him, both from report and personal converse, as of "singular 
desert ; " told that he had been four 3'ears abroad, in Holland, 
France, Italv, and Spain, knew the languages of those countries, 
and was well read in Latin and Greek. With characteristic 
kindliness, Milton added to his recommendation of }"Oung 
Marvell: "This, nry lord, I write sincerely, without any other 
end than to perform my dut}* to the public in helping them 
to an humble servant ; kiying aside those jealousies and that 
emulation which mine own condition might suggest to me by 
bringing in such a coadjutor." 

Milton sent, in 1654, his " Second Defence for the People of 
England " to Cromwell b} r Andrew Marvell' s hand ; and in 1657 
Cromwell made Marvell tutor to young Mr. Dutton, the son of 
an old friend who had died leaving the Protector his bo} T 's 
guardian. Andrew Marvell' s quality had now made itself 
known, and in the same year, 1657, he obtained the office of 
assistant secretaiy to Milton for the foreign correspondence. 
What was written officially for foreigners was Latin ; but un- 
official correspondence and conversation in the chief languages 
of Europe would be required also, and for this Milton and 
Marvell were both qualified. 

Andrew Marvell, who had followed Cromwell's career with 
his verse, was among those who sincerely mourned that great 
man's death. Under the Restoration, Marvell surrendered 
neither to the social nor to the political corruption of the time. 
He represented Hull in Parliament, and fought for liberty of 
conscience with satire, the one weapon effective among triflers 
in high places. According to the custom of an older time, Hull 
paid its members ; and private news-letters then furnishing 
what we find now in the newspapers, Marvell maintained a 



410 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

steady correspondence with his constituents, sending almost 
every post-night an account of the proceedings of Parliament. 
He seldom or never spoke in the House ; but his pen was a 
known power. Indolent King Charles relished the sharpness 
of it, although Iris own follies and vices were not spared. The 
court party would have been glad to secure the one lively 
satirist who was not on their own side. Lord Danb}- found his 
way up to Marvell's second floor in a court leading from the 
Strand, with message of regard from the king, and expression 
of his Majesty's desire to serve him. Marvell answered that 
his Majesty had it not in his power to serve him. When a 
place at court was suggested, Marvell replied that if he accepted 
it he must either be ungrateful to the king in opposing court 
measures, or a traitor to his country in complying with them. 
His Majesty must believe him a lo}*al subject, and true to the 
king's real interest in remaining independent. Lord Danby 
ended with offer of a present of a thousand pounds from his 
Majesty, and that was refused as firmly. In one of his verse 
satires, "Hodge's Vision from the Monument, December, 
1675," the member for Hull refers to the bribeiy of members 
of Parliament : 

"See how in humble guise the slaves advance 
To tell a tale of army, and of France, 
Whilst proud prerogative in scornful guise, 
Their fear, love, duty, danger does despise. 
There, iu a bribed committee, they contrive 

! To give our birthrights to prerogative : 
Give, did I say ? They sell, and sell so dear 
That half each tax Danby distributes there. 
Danby, 'tis fit the price so great shall be, 
They sell religion, sell their liberty/'' 

Marvell told the king in his verse, that, as the astronomer de- 
scribed spots in the sun, he loyally described his faults, and 
pointed out that those who seemed his courtiers were but his 
disease. He attacked those who for their own advantage 
" About the common prince have raised a fence; 
The kingdom from the crown distinct would see, 
And peel the bark to burn at last the tree. 
As Ceres corn, and Flora is the spring, 
As Bacchus wine, the Country is the king." 






To A.D. 1700.] ANDREW MARVELL. 411 

Let him get rid of his " scratching courtiers " — " The smallest 
vermin make the greatest waste" — let him choose for his 
companions and counsellors generous men too noble to flatter, 
and too rich to steal : 

" Where few the number, choice is there less hard ; 
Give us this court, and rule without a guard." 

The spots in the sun were assured^ not spared in Marvell's 
rhymes. In the dialogue between the horses of the two statues, 
that of Charles I. at Charing Cross, set up by Lord Danlry, 
and that of Charles II. at Woolchurch, set up by Sir Robert 
Viner, they agreed in lament 

"To see Dei Gratia writ on the throne, 
And the king's wicked life say, ' God there is none.' " 

The horse of Charing said to the horse of Woolchurch : 
" Thy rider puts no man to death in his wrath, 
But is buried alive in lust and in sloth; " 

and thought he " had rather bear Nero than 8ardanapalus.' , 

" Woolchurch. What is thy opinion of James, Duke of York ? 
Charing. The same that the frogs had of Jupiter's stork. 

With the Turk in his head, and the Pope in his heart, 

Father Patrick's disciples will make England smart. 

If e'er he be king 1 know Britain's doom, 

We must all to a stake, or be converts to Rome. 

Ah Tudor! ah Tudor! of Stuarts enough; 

None ever reigned like old Bess in the ruff." 

And presently we have this question and answer : 

" ' But canst thou devise when things will be mended ? ' 
'When the reign of the line of the Stuarts is ended.' " 

So spoke the verse of Marvell, whose satire both in verse and 
prose dealt only with the vital questions of his time. Thus, 
when Samuel Parker not only attacked the Nonconformists, but 
argued for the supreme power of a king to bind the consciences 
of his subjects, he brought Andrew Marvell down in unmerciful 
uprose satire on himself and his cause. Marvell never lost sight 
of the principle for which he was contending in the form of 
battle then most likely to prevail. Simply direct reasoning 
would have been read only by those who agreed with it alreacly, 
but the worrying of Doctor Parker and his cause with reason in 



412 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

the form of a shrewd bantering satire, not free from a coarseness 
and rough personalit}' more pleasant and convincing then than 
now, was a delightful spectacle even to Doctor Parker's friends. 
There was no better way of knocking the support from under a 
shallow and intemperate apostle of a king's right to direct the 
consciences of his people. Anthon}' a Wood says that Parker 
"judged it more prudent to lay down the cudgels than to enter 
the lists again with an untowardly combatant, so hugeby well 
versed and experienced in the then but newly refined art, 
though much in mode and fashion ever since, of sporting and 
jeering buffoonery. It was generally thought, however, by 
many of those who were otherwise favorers of Parker's cause, 
that the victory lay on Marvell's side, and it wrought this good 
effect on Parker, that forever after it took down his great 
spirit." Burnet says he " withdrew from the town, and ceased 
writing for some years." But Samuel Parker, who was made 
Bishop of Oxford by James II., and died in 1687, poured out 
his impotent rage against his adversary in a Latin History of 
his Own Time (from 1660 to 1680). " De Rebus sui Temporis 
Commentariorum Libri IV.," which was not printed until 1726, 
appeared in an English translation b} T Thomas Newlin in 1727, 
and became known as " The Tory Chronicle." Marvell's next 
prose satire was called forth about three years later by Dr. 
Francis Turner. The Bishop of Hereford, Dr. Croft, had 
published a book urging forbearance and charity upon all the 
contending parties in religion. This book, called " The Naked 
Truth ; or, the True State of the Primitive Church : by a 
Humble Moderator," had been attacked without forbearance or 
charity by Dr. Turner, Master of St. John's College, Cam- 
bridge, in "Animadversions on the Naked Truth." That 
was in 1675, when the popular new play (printed in 1676) was 
Etherege's "Man of Mode." Marvell at once fitted Dr. 
Turner with a character out of it, as "Mr. Smirke ; or, the 
Divine in Mode," and again charged home on the court party 
with allusion fresh from the last new play, and a force of satire 
that cut off the. unlucky Dr. Turner from the support and fellow- 
ship he looked for. Marvell added to his " Mr. Smirke " " A 
Short Historical Essay concerning General Councils, Creeds, 



To A.D. 1700.] SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 413 

and Impositions in Matters of Religion." In 1677 Marvell 
defended John Howe against three assailants of a book of his 
on " Divine Prescience ; " and in the following } T ear he published 
" An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Govern- 
ment in England." In August, 1678, he died. 

8. Sir William Davenant, son of an Oxford innkeeper, 
was born in 1606, was educated at the Oxford Grammar School 
and at Lincoln College, went to court as page to the Duchess 
of Richmond, and was then in the household of Fulke Greville, 
Lord Brooke, until the murder of his patron in 1628. Dave- 
nant then turned to the stage, and began, in 1629, with a tra- 
gedy, " Albovine, King of the Lombards ; " followed next }ear 
by two plays, " The Cruel Brother," and " The Just Italian." 
In 1634, he wrote a masque, " The Temple of Love," to be pre- 
sented at Whitehall by the queen and her ladies. In 1635, he 
published, with other poems, " Madagascar," a poem on an 
achievement at sea by Prince Rupert. Davenant remained in 
favor at court for his masques and plays ; and, after the death 
of Ben Jonson, took his place. In 1639, he was made gov- 
ernor of the compairy acting at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. 
Outbreak of civil war brought him into danger. He escaped, 
returned, was the Earl of Newcastle's Lieutenant-General of 
the Ordnance, and, in 1643, was knighted for his service at the 
siege of Gloucester. As an exile in Paris at the end of the 
king's reign, he was writing " Gondibert," an heroic poem. He 
was living with Lord Jernryn in the Louvre, when, in Januarj', 
1650, he dated the " Discourse upon Gondibert, an Heroic 
Poem," addressed to Thomas Hobbes, who had been reading 
the poem as it was written. It occurred to him to go to the 
lo} r al colony of Virginia with a body of workmen ; but the ves- 
sel in which he sailed was taken by one of the ships of the Par- 
liament, and Davenant was carried to the Isle of Wight, where he 
was imprisoned in Cowes Castle. There he continued " Gondi- 
bert " to the middle of the third book, and as that was half the 
poem — for his plan was to have five books answering to five 
acts of a play, with cantos answering to scenes — he wrote a 
" Postscript to the Reader," dated ''Cowes Castle, Oct. 22, 
1650," and sent it to the press. With its prefatory discourse 



414 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

and postscript this half of the poem, which was left a fragment, 
appeared in 1651. Davenant was brought to London for trial, 
and his life was saved, some say by two aldermen of York, 
some sa} r by Milton. He was detained a prisoner for two years, 
but treated with indulgence. Davenant and his " Gondibert " 
were laughed at, in 1653, by four writers of " Certain Verses 
written by several of the Author's Friends, to be Reprinted in 
the Second Edition of Gondibert ; " and these critics were not 
u temperate and benign." But the book has interest for the 
student. The long, grave, half-philosophical preface, prosing 
about rhyming, marks very distinctly that influence of France 
upon our literature of which the grounds were then fully estab- 
lished, and which came in with the Restoration. As to metre, 
the use in a heroic poem of what Davenant called his " inter- 
woven stanza of four" was preferred, he said, because he 
" believed it would be more pleasant to the reader, in a work of 
length, to give this respite or pause between every stanza (hav- 
ing endeavored that each should contain a period) than to run 
him out of breath with continued couplets. Nor cloth alternate 
rhyme by any lowliness of cadence make the sound less heroic, 
but rather adapt it to a plain and stately composing of music ; 
and the brevity of the stanza renders it less subtle to the com- 
poser, and more easy to the singer, which, in ' stilo recitativo,' 
when the story is long, is chiefly requisite." He adds that he 
was chiefly influenced by hope that the cantos of his poem 
might really be sung at village feasts. Dr}'den for a time fol- 
lowed Davenant' s adoption of this measure as the heroic stanza, 
which Davenant found ready perfected in Sir John Davies's 
" Nosce Teipsum." In its design, the poem blends something 
of the political philosophy of Hobbes with the keen interest in 
nature quickened by Bacon, and seeks to build on them a song 
of love and war, designed, as Davenant said of it in his Post- 
script, " to strip Nature naked, and clothe her again in the per- 
fect shape of virtue." 

The Lombard Aribert rules in Verona; his only child is a daughter, 
Khodalind. Either Prince Oswald or Duke Gondibert, both mighty in 
war, might wed the damsel, and succeed to empire. Oswald is brilliant, 
and ambitious of rule ; Gondibert has ambition of a higher kind. Each 



To A.D. 1700.] SIK WILLIAM I) AVEN ANT. 415 

has his camp and faction. There is a hunting of Gondibert's, leading to 
an ambush of Oswald's, and a duel, in which Gondibert is wounded, 
Oswald slain. Then, at the close of the first book, Gondibert is taken, by- 
advice of the aged Ulfin, to the house of Astragon, the wise and wealthy. 

'• Though cautious Nature, check'd hy Destiny, 
Has many secrets she would ne'er impart; 
This famed philosopher is Nature's spie, 
And hireless gives th' intelligence to Art." 

In the next book, after four cantos of events at Yerona,-the seat of em- 
pire, where Rhodalind can give supreme rule with her hand, we find 
Gondibert in the house of Astragon, which is more full of signs of deep 
inquiry into nature than John Evelyn found the lodgings of " the 
most obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins." Over one gate is 
written, " Great Nature's Office," where old busy men are laboring as 
Nature's registrars; there is a garden, "Nature's Nursery;" a skeleton 
soom, called " The Cabinet of Death:" 

" Which some the Monument of Bodies name; 

The Arke, which saves from graves all dying kindes ; 
This to a structure led, long known to Fame, 
And call'd the Monument of Vanish'd Minds. 

"Where, when they thought they saw in well-sought hooks 
Th' assembled soules of all that Men held wise, 
It bred such awfull rev'rence in their looks, 
As if they saw the bury'd writers rise." 

There is also a triple Temple, dedicated " To Days of Praise, and Peni- 
tence, and Prayer." In this half mythical house of Astragon there is 
Birtha, daughter of Astragon, who tends Gondibert's wounds, and whose 
womanhood is partly an ideal of the simple beauty and beneficence of 
Nature. Her Gondibert loves, though Aribert had destined him for 
Rhodalind. When Gondibert seeks Astragon' s assent to this love, he 
has to give an account of himself to the lady's father, and expresses 
much of the main thought of the poem by telling in what way he is 
ambitious. He has vanquished the Huns, he would conquer the world, 
but only because division of interest is the main cause of discord (here 
Thomas Hobbes approved the writer's principles), and Gondibert wished 
to bring the universe, for its own peace, under a single monarchy. A 
great warlike ambition ; but, he says : 

" But let not what so needfully was done, 

Though still pursued, make you ambition feare; 
For could I force all monarchys to one, 
That universal crown I would not weare. 

"He who does blindly soar at Rhodalind, 

Mounts like seeld Doves, still higher from his ease ; 
And in the lust of empire he may finde, 
High hope does better than fruition please. 



416 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

" The victor's solid rccompenee is rest : 

And 'tis unjust that chiefs who pleasure shunn, 
Toyling in youth, should he in age opprest 
With greater toyles, hy ruling what they wonn. 

" Here all reward of conquest I would finde; 
Leave shining thrones for Birtha in a shade; 
With Nature's quiet wonders fill my minde, 
And praise her most because she Birtha made." 

Davcnant is artificial in his praise of nature, but there is true 
dignity in man}' passages of " Gondibert," with frequent felicity 
of expression ; there is such aim at ingenuity as we find in the 
Later Euphuists, modified by the new influence of the French 
critical school. Its chance of a good reception was not im- 
proved bj* Hobbes's declaration, made in its behalf, that " Gon- 
dibert " deserved to last as long as the "iEneid" or '•Iliad." 
The jest was ready against a book not serious enough for one-half 
of the public and too serious for the other, that said, laughing : 

" Room for the best of poets heroic, 
If you'll believe two wits and a stoic. 
Down go the Iliads, down go the iEneidos: 
All must give place to the Gondiberteidos." 

After his release from imprisonment. Davenant evaded the 
interdict upon dramatic entertainments by opening Rutland 
House, Charterhouse Yard, on the 21st of 3Iay. 1656. for what 
he called operas. Blending of music with dramatic action had 
its origin in Italy. An Italian drama with musical accompani- 
ments had been represented at the Castle of St. Angelo, in 
1480 ; but the first real opera was performed early in the seven- 
teenth century. Davenant, therefore, was following a new 
Italian fashion that had already found its way to France. At 
Rutland House, Davenant produced the first part of his " Siege 
of Rhodes," with various scenery, each entry prepared b}* in- 
strumental music, with dialogue in recitative interspersed with 
songs and choruses ; his attempt was that of the musician in 
his " Play-house to Let." who says : 

"I would have introduc'd heroique story 

In stilo recitativo." 

With the Restoration arose two patented dramatic com- 
panies, servants of the king and of his brother, the Duke of 
York. Sir William Davenant' s company was that of the Duke 



To A. D. 1700.] SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 41.7 

of York's players, acting first at a theatre in Portugal Row, 
Lincoln's Inn Fields, and afterwards in Dorset Gardens. 
Thomas Betterton was the best actor in this company. The 
king's players acted at the Cockpit until they were read}', in 
April, 1663, with a new Theatre Royal, on the site of the 
present house in Drury Lane. Davenant was also made poet- 
laureate. A clause in his patent as manager of the Duke of 
York's players said, " Whereas the women's parts in pUrys 
have hitherto been acted by men in the habits of women, at 
which some have taken offence, we do permit and give leave 
for the time to come that all women's parts be acted by women 
on the stage." The actress's profession, therefore, became 
established at the Restoration, and women acted at both houses. 
Actresses began to appear in the time of Charles I. In " The 
Court Beggar," a comedy hy Ben Jonson's old servant, 
Richard Brome, acted in 1632, although not printed till 1653, 
Lady Strangelove says, "The boy's a pretty actor, and his 
mother can play her part. The women now are in great re- 
quest." Changes of scener}', also, which had been introduced 
by Davenant under the Commonwealth, became at the Restora- 
tion an established custom in both theatres. In 1662, Dave- 
nant revised his " Siege of Rhodes," and produced the second 
part, still including music and variety of measures, but using 
the rhymed couplet as the staple of heroic dialogue. It was 
the first English play of its time that did so. Davenant had, 
in his former plays, written what had come to be taken for 
blank-verse ; but its degeneration had been rapid, and blank- 
verse in Davenant }ielded such lines as these : 

" How did the governors of the 
Severe house, digest th' employment my 
Request did lay upon their gravities ?" 

In the " Siege of Rhodes," Davenant held by the extension 
of that theory of Hobbes's to contending nations as well as to 
contending men of the same country, which he had made the 
ground of Gondibert's ambition to subdue the world. His life 
was too much given to low pleasures, and he was called upon 
to entertain the frivolous. If Davenant could have felt with 
Milton, that he who would excel in poetry should be himself a 



418 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

poem, his genius had wings to bear him higher than he ever 
reached. Among the musical love-passions of the " Siege of 
Rhodes," he was still aiming at some embodiment of his 
thought that the nations of Christendom fail in their work for 
want of unity. They let the Turks occupy Rhodes because the}' 
could not join for succor. In his dedication of the published 
play to the Earl of Clarendon, Davenant (referring with honor 
to • • the great images represented in tragedy by Monsieur Cor- 
neille ") says : '-' In this poem I have revived the remembrance 
of that desolation which was permitted by Christian princes, 
when they favored the ambition of such as defended the diver- 
sity of religions (begot by the factions of learning) in Ger- 
many ; whilst those who would never admit learning into their 
empire (lest it should meddle with religion, and intangle it with 
controversy) did make Rhodes defenceless ; which was the only 
fortified academy in Christendom where divinity and arms were 
equally professed." 

In 1667 appeared a new version of Shakespeare's " Tempest." 
based upon a suggestion b}* Davenant that Shakespeare's play of 
a woman who had never seen a man could be improved by adding 
to it a man who had never seen a woman. This adaptation of 
Shakespeare to the taste of the court of Charles II. was one of 
Davenant 's latest devices. He died in April, 1668, aged sixty- 
two, and Dryden succeeded to his dignity as poet-laureate. 

9. After the death of John Milton, the greatest poet and man 
of letters in England during the Second Half of the Seventeenth 
Century, was John Dryden, who wrought in almost every form 
of literary labor, in prose and verse. He is the representative 
of the best and the worst qualities in English literature during 
this period ; and before proceeding to the study of his career 
and of what he wrote, we will group together some of his earlier 
contemporaries — poets, dramatists, and satirists — who were 
brought into some contact with him. 

10. Thomas Killigrew (b. 1611. d. 1652) was son of Sir Robert Killi- 
grew, of Hanworth, near Hampton Court, chamberlain to Queen Henri- 
etta Maria. Thomas Killigrew had been page of honor to Charles I., 
and had married a maid of honor. He was witty and profligate, amused 
Charles II., who made him Groom of the Bedchamber, and was one of 



To A.D. 1700.J GEORGE VILLIERS. 419 

the king's familiar companions. Killigrew published, in 1664, eleven 
" Plays," and thought it worth noting that he had written them in nine 
different cities — London, Paris, Madrid, Kome, Turin, Florence, Ven- 
ice, Naples, and Basle. 

Sir Charles Sedley, the Lisideius of the " Essay of Dramatic Poe- 
sie," was about twenty-one years old at the Restoration, and another 
of the dissolute clever light wits of the court. In 1677, he had just 
written a tragedy on "Antony and Cleopatra" (published 1677); and 
in 1688, his comedy of the "Mulberry Garden" was very successful. 
He had skill in frivolous love-verses, of which the Earl of Rochester 
wrote : 

M Sedley has that prevailing, gentle art 
That can with a resistless charm impart 
The loosest wishes to the chastest heart." 

He died about 1701. 

11. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was born 
in 1627, was with Prince Charles in Scotland, was at the battle 
of Worcester in 1651, and, in November, 1657, married Andrew 
Marvell's pupil, the heiress and only daughter of Lord Fair- 
fax. By this marriage he saved the greater part of his own 
estate. At the Restoration he had an income of twenty 
thousand pounds a year, became Gentleman of the King's 
Bedchamber, Privy Councillor, and Master of the Horse. He 
was lively, careless, extravagant, and variously clever, with 
taste for chemistry and literature, for music and intrigue. 
In 1671, he caused to be produced at the King's Theatre 
his celebrated play, " The Rehearsal," a burlesque on the heroic 
dramas of the da}'. He had begun to write it when Dave- 
nant was laureate, and had given to his hero, Bayes, who wore 
the laurel, some of Davenant's characteristics. Now Diyden 
wore the bays, and Dryden presently produced some notable 
examples of heroic sound and fury. The jest, therefore, was 
now pointed more especially at Dryden. It was really a plea 
for good sense against show} T nonsense ; merry, and free from 
the indecenc}' then common in dramatic jests. It was only in 
the preceding 3'ear, 1670, that Diyden had the grant of the 
office of Poet-Laureate, vacant in 1668 ; but there was joined 
to it the office of Historiographer Royal, vacant since 1666. In 
"The Rehearsal," Smith from the country and Johnson of the 
town meet ; plays are talked of. Mr. Bayes passes across the 



420 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

stage, and is caught as an author. He has a new play in his 
pocket, explains his method of producing plays, is going to 
the rehearsal of his new play, takes them to it, instructs the 
actors, and discourses with Smith and Johnson over a jumble 
of burlesque scenes, which w T ould be recognized by playgoers 
of the time as caricatures of passages in plays of Davenant, 
Dry den, Sir Robert Howard, and others. There is a plot, 
which is no plot, of their gentleman usher and physician against 
the two kings of Brentford ; there is an army concealed at 
Knightsbriclge ; there is Prince Volscius, who falls in love as 
he is pulling on his boots, and makes his legs an emblem of his 
various thought ; there is a Drawcansir, whose name pairs with 
Dnxlen's Almanzor. Almahide, in "The Conquest of Gra- 
nada," says to Almanzor, u Who dares to interrupt my private 
walk ? ' ' Almanzor replies : 

" He who dares love, and for that love must die, 
And knowing this, dares yet love on, am I." 

Usurping King Physician sa}^s to Drawcansir, "What man is 
this that dares disturb our feast? " Drawcansir replies : 
" He that dares drink, and for that drink dares die, 
And knowing this, dares yet drink on, am I." 

And so forth. The last words of the Epilogue were : 
" May this prodigious way of writing cease. 
Let's have, at least once in our lives, a time 
When we may hear some Reason, not all Rhyme: 
We have these ten years felt its influence ; 
Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sense." 
12. It was on the eve of a deadly encounter between the English and 
the Dutch fleets, in 1665, that Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, after- 
wards Earl of Dorset (b. 1637, d. 1706), produced his "Song written 
at Sea, in the First Dutch War, 1665, the Night before an Engagement." 
Charles Sackville, in these days, was a licentious wit of the court ; but 
he had taste, and came into much honor among patrons of literature. 
His song before the battle has always passed as his best piece, and it 
represents him with no thought but of court gallantry to the ladies, on 
the eve of a conflict that would scatter death around him : 

" To pass our tedious hours away 

We throw a merry main ; 
Or else at serious ombre play; 

But why should we in vain 
Each other's ruin thus pursue? 
We were undone when we left you. 

With a fa la, la, la, la." 



To A. D.i 7 oo.] JOHN SHEFFIELD. 421 

It does not follow that the writer had no serious thought when he 
wrote thus; but serious thought was out of fashion at the court of 
Charles II. 

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was one of the court wits who 
trifled in verse. His best piece of verse is "Upon Nothing." 

13. A courtier and poet of much higher mark was Wentworth 
Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, born about 1633, nephew and godson to the 
Earl of Strafford. He was at the Protestant College at Caen when, by 
the death of his father, he became Earl of Roscommon, at the age of 
ten. He remained abroad, travelled in Italy till the Restoration, when 
he came in with the king, became captain of the band of Pensioners, 
took for a time to gambling, married, indulged his taste in literature, 
strongly under the French influence, and had a project for an English 
academy like that of France. He translated into verse Horace's "Art 
of Poetry," translated into verse Virgil's sixth Eclogue, one or two 
Odes of Horace, and a passage from Guarini's "Pastor Fido." Of his 
original writing the most important piece is "An Essay on Translated 
Verse," carefully polished in the manner of Boileau, sensible, and often 
very happy in expression. Himself, in a corrupt time, a poet of "un- 
spotted lays," he was true to his doctrine that 

" Immodest words admit of no defence; 
For want of decency is want of sense." 

When he tells the translator that he must thoroughly understand what 
he is translating, he says : 

" While in your thoughts you find the least debate, 
You may confound, but never can translate. 
Your style will this through all disguises show, 
For none explain more clearly than they know." 

He pities from his soul unhappy men compelled by want to prostitute 
the pen; but warns the rich: 

" Let no vain hope your easy mind seduce, 
For rich ill poets are without excuse." 

And let no man mistake every stir to write verse for a sign of power: 

" Beware what spirit rages in your breast; 
For ten inspired, ten thousand are possest." 

With all its great faults, the court of the Restoration must be credited 
with a good society of men of high rank who made it a point of fashion 
to cultivate their minds, acquire, according to the new standard of 
France, a fine critical taste, write verse themselves, — as Lord Mulgrave 
wrote, " Without his song no fop is to be found," — receive sweet in- 
cense of praise from poorer writers, and give in return for it a kindly 
patronage. He died in 1684. 

14. John Sheffield (b. 1649, d. 1721) became by his father's death 
Earl of Mulgrave, at the age of nine. At seventeen he was in the 



422 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

fleet against the Dutch, and he served afterwards also in fleet and army. 
He was made Duke of Buckinghamshire in 1703. In the days of 
Charles II. he wrote light pieces of verse, and two poems in the new 
critical fashion, which were his chief efforts — an "Essay on Satire," in 
1675, and an " Essay on Poetry," which is a little " Art of Poetry " ap- 
plied to England. The wholesome stress is still laid on good sense, in 
strong re-action against the paste hrilliants of the decayed Italian school. 
" 'Tis wit and sense that is the subject here," he writes: 

" As all is dulness when the Fancy's bad ; 
So, without Judgment, Fancy is hut mad: 
And Judgment has a boundless influence 
Not only in the choice of "Words or Sense, 
But on the World, on Manners, and on Men ; 
Fancy is but the Feather of the Pen ; 
Reason is that substantial, useful part, 
Which gains the Head ; while t'other wins the Heart." 

Lord Mulgrave placed Shakespeare and Fletcher at the head of modern 
drama; but wrote some years afterwards two tragedies, "Julius Caesar," 
and " Marcus Brutus," in which he set his own taste above Shake- 
speare's. Profoundly ignorant of the real unity of plan in Shakespeare's 
" Julius Caesar," and of the place of tyrannicide at the heart of the 
drama, the polite patron and cultivator of literature in the new manner 
of France saw that Shakespeare could not be saved by the dramatic 
gospel of Corneille, and reconstructed his " Julius Caesar," with the 
unities respected: ".This play begins the day before Caesar's death, and 
ends an hour after it." His rebuilding threw out material enough for 
another play, the tragedy of " Marcus Brutus." Here " the play begins 
the day before the battle of Philippi, and ends with it;" but Lord Mul- 
grave regretted the inevitable change of scene from Athens to Philippi, 
whereby, he said, he 

•• Commits one crime that needs an Act of Grace, 
And breaks the Law of Unity of Place." 

Comparison of Shakespeare in his habit as he lived, with Shakespeare 
as dignified with a Louis Quatorze wig by Lord Mulgrave, illustrates 
very well the weak side of the French influence on English literature. 
The polite lord even corrected Antony's speech over Caesars body. 
Shakespeare made him say : 

" The evil that men do lives after them, 
The good is oft interred with their bones." 

Bones! Vulgar and unpleasant. His lordship polished this into " The 
good is often buried in their graves." Each play has a closing thought to 
mark the adapter's want of sympathy with Brutus. Indeed, Lord Mul- 
grave had written an ode in depreciation of Brutus as reply to Cowley's 
in his praise. 

15. Thomas D'Urfey, born in Devonshire about 1630, lived to be 
very old, was known in the reign of George I. as one of the wits of the 



ToA.D. 1700.] THOMAS SHADWELL. 423 

time of Charles II., and was "Tom " to the last, so that even the stone 
over his grave recorded of him "TomD'Urfey: died February 26, 1723." 
He wrote plays, operas, poems, and songs, and was a diner-out among 
great people, whom he entertained by singing his own songs to his own 
music. That was his chief title to honor, and he was so well known that 
a country gentleman who came to London must not go home till he was 
able to say that he had met Tom D'Urfey. In 1676, D'Urfey began with 
"Archery Revived," a heroic poem; a tragedy, "The Siege of Mem- 
phis;" and a comedy, "The Fond Husband; or, The Plotting Sister." 
Comedies, with an occasional tragedy or tragi-comedy, then followed one 
another fast. In 1682, D'Urfey, who had nothing of Butler's substance 
in him, published a satire, called "Butlers Ghost; or, Hudibras, the 
Fourth Part: with Reflections on these Times." A volume of songs by 
D'Urfey appeared in 1687, and the collection made from time to time 
was completed in six volumes by the year 1720, as "Wit and Mirth; or, 
Pills to Purge Melancholy: being a large Collection of Ballads, Sonnets, 
etc., with their Tunes." 

16. Sir George Etherege, after some university training at Cam- 
bridge, some travel abroad, and some reading of law, gave himself to 
easy enjoyment of life among the men of fashion. He made himself a 
comrade of George Villiers, Sedley, Rochester, and their friends, by the 
success of his first comedy, " The Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub," 
published in 1664. This was followed, in 1668, by " She Would if She 
Could ; " and, in 1676, by his third and last comedy, " The Man of Mode; 
or, Sir Fopling Flutter." There was ease and liveliness in these images 
of the corrupt life gathered about Charles II. by one who found enjoy- 
ment in its baseness. Etherege got his knighthood to enable him to 
marry a rich widow; was sent as English minister to Ratisbon; and died 
there about 1694, by breaking his neck in a fall down stairs, when, as a 
drunken host, he was lighting his guests out of his rooms. 

17. Of the Whig replies to Dryden's satire " Absalom and Achito- 
phel," in 1681, one, "Azaria and Hushai," was by Samuel Pordage, 
son of the Rev. John Pordage, of Bradheld, in Berkshire, deprived of his 
living in 1654, on a charge of conversation with evil spirits. Pordage 
was a member of Lincoln's Inn, and had published in 1660, with notes, 
"The Troades," from Seneca, and a volume of poems. He was the 
author, also, of two tragedies, " Herod and Mariamne," in 1673, and the 
" Siege of Babylon," in 1678, and of a romance called " Eliana." Sam- 
uel Pordage replied to Dryden's satire with a temperance rare in the 
controversies of that time. Unlike other opponents, he gave Dryden 
credit for his genius ; and the only lines in the reply that have any re- 
semblance to the usual coarseness of abuse are those which comment 011 
the opening lines of Dryden's poem, which were meanly complaisant to 
the king's vices. 

18. Thomas Shadwell, of a good Staffordshire family, was 



424 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

born in 1640, at Stanton Hall, Norfolk. He was educated at 
Caius College, Cambridge, studied law in the Middle Temple, 
went abroad, came home, and at once became popular as a 
dramatist. He began, in 1668, with "The Sullen Lovers," a 
comed} T . This was followed by the comedies of " The Humor- 
ists " and " The Miser." The tragedy of " Psyche," in 1674, 
was followed by the tragedy of w k The Libertine ' ' and the 
corned}' of ' ' Epsom Wells . " In 1 6 78 , Shadwell made the requi- 
site improvements in "Timon of Athens," which he said in 
the dedication " was originally Shakespeare's, who never made 
more masterly strokes than in this ; 3-et I can truly say I have 
made it into a play." Shadwell' s " Lancashire Witches and 
Teague O'Divelly, the Irish Priest," first printed in 1681, held 
the stage for some time, and contains one of the earliest speci- 
mens of the stage Irishman. This pla} r not only ridiculed the 
Roman Catholics, but was spoken of before its production as 
containing an attack on many clergy of the Church of England, 
in the character of Smerk, chaplain to Sir Edward Hartfort, 
"foolish, knavish, Popish, arrogant, insolent ; } T et for his inter- 
est slavish." Abuse of the office of domestic chaplain was 
satirized in this character, and also the spirit of church intoler- 
ance against the Nonconformists ; a great part of the dialogue 
that developed Mr. Smerk was struck out \>y the Master of the 
Revels, and appeared only in the published pla}-, where it was 
printed in Italics. Thus it was said to Smerk : 

" With furious zeal you press for discipline, 
With fire and blood maintain your great Diana, 
Foam at the mouth when a Dissenter's named ; 
(With fiery eyes, wherein we flaming see 
A persecuting spirit) you roar at 
Those whom the wisest of your function strive 
To win by gentleness and easy ways." 

The stage Irish of that time had a touch of the stage Welsh. 
One says to Teague, " You are a Popish priest? " He answers, 
"Ah, but 'tis no matter for all daat, Jo} T : by my shoul, but 1 
will taak de oades, and I think I vill be excus'd ; but hark vid 
you a while, by iny trott, I shall be a Papist too for all dat, 
indeed, } 7 es." In such comedies of Shadwell as " Epsom 
Wells," "Bury Fair" (1689), and " The Scowrers " (1690), 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHX CMOWNE. 425 

we have a clear surface reflection of certain forms of life in the 
later Stuart time. He died in 1692. 

19. Elkanah Settle, born at Dunstable in 1648, studied at 
Trinity College, Oxford, but left the university without a degree, 
came to London, and in 1673 achieved a great success with his 
tragedy in rlrvme of " The Empress of Morocco." Settle 
showed some vanity in the dedication of the play, which was 
published with illustrative engravings — a frontispiece of the 
outside of the Duke's Theatre, and pictures of the stage set 
with the chief scenes. His fellow-dramatists did not admire 
the 3'oung man's self-satisfied contempt of "the impudence of 
scribblers in this age," that " has so corrupted the original de- 
sign of dedication." Having no very great genius to be proud 
of, he sneered at Dryden's critical dedications and prefaces with 
a " But, my lord, whilst I trouble 3*011 with this kind of dis- 
course, I beg }*ou would not think I design to give rubs to the 
Press as some of our tribe have done to the Stage." Settle's 
popular pla3 r was open to criticism, and his vanity invited it. 
" The Empress of Morocco " was accordingly pulled to pieces 
in a pamphlet written chiefly hy John Crowne, with aid from 
Shad well and Dryden. Settle replied, and the controversy 
seemed to give him more importance with his public. Other 
tragedies hy Settle followed: " Love and Revenge," in 1675 ; 
then " The Conquest of China 03- the Tartars ; " " Ibrahim, the 
Illustrious Bassa," from Madelene de Scuderi's novel; •• Pas- 
tor Fido," from Guarini's pastoral drama; "Fatal Love;" 
" The Female Prelate, being a Histoiy of the Life and Death 
of Pope Joan." Settle lived to old age, but fell into such 
poverty that he took part in the low dramatic performances 
exhibited in a booth at Bartholomew Fair. He died in the 
Charterhouse in 1724. 

20. John Crowne, who had been foremost in attack on Settle's 
"Empress of Morocco," was the son of an Independent minister in 
Nova Scotia. He was for a time gentleman usher to an old lady of 
quality; but in 1671 he appeared as a dramatist with the tragi-comedy 
of "Juliana," the first of about eighteen plays written by him. He 
attached himself to the court party, and in 1675 satirized the Whigs 
in a comedy called "City Politics." In the same year he produced 
at court the masque of " Calisto." In 1677 Crowne brought out a 



426 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

tragedy in two parts on " The Destruction of Jerusalem." It is said 
that, after the appearance of this play, Rochester, who introduced 
Crowne at court, ceased to be his friend; also that he made enemies 
and hindered his future success by attacking the Whigs in his " City 
Politics." The king promised to do something for him when he bad 
written one comedy more, and gave him for groundwork a Spanish play 
by Moreto, "No Puede Ser" ("It Cannot Be"). This was the origin 
of Crowne' s most successful comedy, " Sir Courtly Nice ;.." but Charles 
II. fell fatally ill on the last day of its rehearsal, and the dramatist had 
afterwards to live as he could by his talent. He died about 1703. 

21. Nathaniel Lee (d. 1692), the son of Dr. Lee, Incumbent of 
Hatfield, was educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, 
Cambridge; but, left to his own resources, he took to the stage, and, in 
1072, played at the Duke's Theatre the part of Duncan in "Macbeth." 
Although an admirable reader, he was unable to get his living as an 
actor. He then produced, at the age of twenty-five, the first of his eleven 
plays, "Nero;" and between 1675 and 1684, this was followed by eight 
other plays of his own, including his two most popular, " The Rival 
Queens; or, Alexander the Great" (1677), and " Theodosius ; or, the 
Force of Love" (1680). He also joined Dryden in the plays of "(Edi- 
pus" (1679) and "The Duke of Guise" (1683). There was a wildfire 
of imagination in Lee, and he drank too freely. In November, 1684, he 
was received into Bedlam, where he remained four years. A scribbler 
said to him when he was there, "It is easy to write like a madman." 
" No," said Lee, " it is not easy to write like a madman; but it is very 
easy to write like a fool." Between his recovery and his death, at the age 
of about forty, Lee wrote, in 1689 and 1690, two more plays, ' ' The Prin- 
cess of Cleve" and "The Massacre of Paris;" but he was chiefly de- 
pendent upon ten shillings a week from the Theatre Royal. He brought 
elevation of thought and occasional pathos, with frequent passion of 
love, into the sound and fury of the heroic style. There was more in 
him of the finer touch of nature than in any other of the dramatists of 
his time but Otway. 

22. Thomas Otway, son of the Rev. Humphre}- Otwa}^, 
Rector of Woolbeding, was born at Trotton, near Midhurst, 
Sussex, in March, 1651. He was educated at Winchester 
School, and then at Christ Church, Oxford ; but he left Oxford 
without a degree, and became an unsuccessful actor in the Duke 
of York's company, failing at once in Mrs. Behn's traged}' of 
u The Jealous Bridegroom." He produced " Alcibiades " in 
1675, and soon afterwards, " Don Carlos, Prince of Spain," 
which was a great success, was played for thirty successive 
nights, and brought Otway some money. He took his plot (as 



To A . D . 1 700. ] THOMAS OTWAY. 427 

Schiller did long afterwards) from " Dom Carlos, Nouvelle His- 
torique," published in 1672 by the Abbe de St. Real, a clever 
French writer of that time. In 1677 Otway published his 
traged}' of "Titus and Berenice," from Racine's "Berenice." 
Otway followed in his own way Racine's plot, using the same 
characters, and compressing the piece into three Acts. With 
his version of "Berenice," Otwa}* published "The Cheats of 
Scapin," a version of one of Moliere's comedies. A comed\', 
" Friendship in Fashion," which reflected the low morals of 
the court, was followed, in 1680, b}- two tragedies very different 
in character. One of them, " Caius Marius," illustrated the 
predominance of the French school and the neglect of Shake- 
speare ; for here Otwa}-, not indeed with the self-sufficiency 
of a Lord Mulgrave, but with expression in the prologue of 
a poet's reverence for Shakespeare, mixed with his play a. 
great part of "Romeo and Juliet," in a form that suited the 
new sense of the polite in literature. The classical discords 
of Marius and Sulla replaced those of the Capulets and Mon- 
tagues, and Romeo became a Marius Junior. Some speeches 
of Mercutio were given to Sulpitius ; Nurse remained Nurse, 
but Juliet was changed into Lavinia. Otway' s other play, 
produced in 1680, was "The Orphan." In both these plays 
Otway abandoned rlryme, and adopted blank-verse as the fit 
measure for tragedy. In "The Orphan" he abandoned also 
the French faith in kings and queens, princes and princesses, 
as the sole objects of tragic interest. The tragedy is a 
domestic drama, written in verse with much care. Animal 
passion is too obtrusively the mainspring of the plot ; but the 
appeal was meant to be throughout to the higher feelings of the 
audience, and "The Orphan" held the stage for years as a 
touching picture of innocence and beaut}' cast down into utter- 
most distress. If the passions were overstrained, they yet had 
truth of nature for their starting-point ; and Otway drew natural 
tears from man} T who found only an artificial excitement in 
heroic plays which did not " servilely creep after sense." 
Having found in blank-verse the fitting instrument, Otway put 
out his strength again in a phvy, " Venice Preserved," which is 
still occasionally acted. He took his story from another book 



428 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

of the same French writer to whom he was indebted for the 
plot of his " Don Carlos." " Venice Preserved " is founded on 
the best book written by St. Real, entitled " Histoire de la 
Conjuration que les Espagnols formerent, en 1618, contre la 
Republique de Venise," published in 1674, and, like the " Dom 
Carlos," a passage of history transformed into historical ro- 
mance. Otway, who produced in u The Orphan " and " Venice 
Preserved" the two best plays of the later Stuart drama, and 
who was a stout supporter of the Royal cause in detached 
poems as well as through his plays, was suffered to die of 
want. He died in April, 1685, in a public-house on Tower 
Hill, in which he had taken refuge to escape a debtor's prison. 
It is said that, in passion of hunger, he asked a shilling from 
a gentleman, who gave him a guinea ; that he at once bought 
bread, and was choked in eager swallowing of the first mouth- 
ful. Probably that is an invention ; but it is an invention 
founded on the fact of Otway 's absolute distress and poverty. 
In his " Orphan," although he laid the scene in Bohemia, there 
was England meant in the old noble's language of devotion to 
the king, but he said to his sons, bitterly : 

" If you have Children, never give them Knowledge, 
'Twill spoil their Fortune, Fools are all the Fashion. 
If you've Religion, keep it to yourselves: 
Atheists will else make use of Toleration, 
And laugh you out on't; never shew Religion, 
Except ye mean to pass for Knaves of Conscience, 
And cheat believing Fools that think ye honest." 

23. One woman was among those who maintained the more 
corrupt form of the later Stuart drama. This was Aphra 
Behn, born at Canterbury, in 1642, daughter of a General 
Johnson, who obtained through his kinsman, Lord Willouglury, 
the post of Governor of Surinam and the thirty-six West- 
India Islands. He went when Aphra was very young, and 
died on the passage ; but his widow and family settled in Suri- 
nam, where Aphra became acquainted with the African prince, 
Oroonoko, a slave who suffered torture and death for his love 
of liberty. Upon his story she founded afterwards the best 
of her novels. Aphra returned to England after some years in 



To A.D. 1700.] APHRA BEHN. 429 

South America, married Mr. Belm, a Dutch merchant in Lon- 
don, and was soon left a widow. Charles II. delighted in her, 
and sent her in 1666, during the Dutch War, to use her charms 
of wit and liveliness as a political sp}' at Antwerp. She ob- 
tained an ascendency over Van der Albert, an influential man, 
who enabled her to report home De Ruyter's design of coming 
up the Thames, but her report was not believed. Van der 
Albert died afterwards when he was about to marry Mrs. Belm. 
On her way home she was nearly shipwrecked. Her character 
suffered b}" the freedom of her manners. She began her career 
as a dramatist in 1671, and wrote for her livelihood seventeen 
plays, chiefly comedies, which reflected the gross manners of 
the court, and now and then belabored the Roundheads, who 
gave their name to one comedy produced in 1682. Her most 
popular pla}' was "The Rover; or, the Banished Cavaliers," 
in 1677, followed by a second part in 1681. She translated 
Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" and Fontenelle's "Plurality of 
Worlds," wrote model love-letters, wrote poems, and was 
called " the divine Astroea." She wrote also short novels, 
among which, and among all her writings, " Oroonoko ; or, 
the Royal Slave," stands foremost, generous in temper, pure 
in tone, and the first book in our literature that stirred English 
blood with a sense of the negro's suffering in slavery. The 
story was a romance founded on fact, told as from the writer's 
personal experience in Surinam, in clear, good, unaffected 
English. Mrs. Behn, with a slave for her hero, known as 
Caesar among the planters, a slave whose thirst for freedom 
drew other slaves from their work, who was flogged and rubbed 
with pepper, and at last was hacked to death limb by limb, 
represented him as a man with high and tender feeling. When 
she had told of his fortitude, she wrote of the unhappy negro 
as "this great man." "Thus," she saj's, "died this great 
man ; worthy of a better fate, and a more sublime wit than mine 
to write his praise ; 3-et I hope the reputation of nry pen is con- 
siderable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all 
ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant 
Imoinda." The second strong call upon Englishmen for s} T m- 
pathy with the slave was produced by this novel, — Southern's 



430 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

best play, "Oroonoko," which was founded upon it, and en- 
forced its argument upon the stage. Mrs. Behn died in 1689. 

24. Of another lady known as a writer, who died early in the reign 
of Charles II., and who was praised in style of the "Precieuses" as 
" the matchless Orinda," none but pleasant memories remain. She was 
Catherine Philips, for whom Jeremy Taylor wrote his treatise on 
Friendship, and who was worthy to be Jeremy Taylor's friend. Al- 
though praised at court, she preferred quiet life with her husband in 
Wales, and died of small-pox in 1664, when only thirty-three years old. 
She published nothing in her lifetime. A few months before her death 
a publisher had collected copies of her poems that had passed among her 
friends, and issued them without her consent, as "Poems by the Incom- 
parable Mrs. K. P." Five years after her death a friend edited the first 
full and accurate edition of her works, as "Poems by the most deserv- 
edly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda. To which 
is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey and Horace Tragedies. With 
several other Translations out of French." Cowley was among the 
writers of the prefatory verses in her honor. There is one note never 
absent from the praise : 

" She does above our best examples rise 
In hate of vice, and scorn of vanities." 

The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle were much praised in 
their own time for their writings in prose and verse. The Duke was 
born in 1592, and died in 1676. His writings consist of poems, several 
plays, and a large treatise on horsemanship. The Duchess, who died in 
1673, was the more gifted and the more voluminous writer. Among her 
works are "The World's Olio," "Nature's Pictures," "Allegories," 
"Philosophical Fancies," "Orations," "Sociable Letters," "Life of 
William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle," and numerous plays. 

25. We now turn from the earlier literary contemporaries of 
Dryden to the study of Dryden himself, who for many years 
was a sort of literary autocrat in England. 

John Dryden, born Aug. 9, 1631, at Aldwinckle, in North- 
amptonshire, of good family, was educated at Westminster 
School, where he wrote some Euphuistic verse, and at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, where he took his degree of B.A. in 1654, 
the year of his father's death. He seems to have come to 
London in the summer of 1657, and was at first in the home of 
his cousin, and Cromwell's friend, Sir Gilbert Pickering. He 
was in his twenty-eighth 3-ear when Cromwell died, on the 3d 
of September, 1658, and he wrote, after the funeral, one of the 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEN 431 

many tributes to his memory, " Heroic Stanzas on the Death of 
Oliver Cromwell," using the measure of " Gondibert." With 
customary strain to be ingenious, there was a simple close. He 
was among those who welcomed the new order of things, and 
his " Astnea Redux," in honor of the Restoration, was pub 
lished at once by Henry Herringman. Although this poem 
follows in Dryden's works the " Heroic Stanzas on the Death of 
Cromwell," it must be remembered that there was an interval of 
eighteen months between their dates — months busy with events 
that would be strong argument to a mind like Dryden' s against 
the political faith in which he had been bred. Until the death 
of Cromwell, nothing occurred to change the course of family 
opinion which Dryden had inherited and drew from those about 
him ; but the disposition of his mind placed him among those 
whose nature it is to seek peace by the upholding of authority. 
The experience of the last eighteen months of the Common- 
wealth made him no mere flatterer of Monarchy, but, through- 
out the reign of Charles II., the most active supporter of its 
claim to the obedience of all. In religion, the same tendency 
of mind led him at last to find peace in reliance upon the 
supreme authority of Rome. He left opinions in which he had 
been bred for those to which he had been born, and never 
swerved from them. Maintenance of one central authority 
was the principle on which philosophers, statesmen, poets, and 
a large part of the common crowd of men, based a consistent 
view of what was best for the well-being of society. In 1661, 
Dryden addressed a panegyric "To his Sacred Majesty," on 
his coronation, and New-Year's da}' verses, in 1662, "To my 
Lord Chancellor," Lord Clarendon. 

John Dryden's first corned}', in prose — " The Wild Gallant," 
produced in February, 1663, by the king's company — was a 
failure. He had no aptitude for the licentious light comedy now 
in favor ; but " The Wild Gallant " was followed, at the same 
theatre, before the end of the year, by a tragi- comedy, "The 
Rival Ladies," which brought into play some of his higher 
powers, and was a success. Dryden was at the same time 
working with Sir Robert Howard at his play of " The 
Indian Queen," which was produced at the king's theatre, with 



432 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

rich scener}' and dresses, in Januar}-, 1664. Sir Robert How- 
ard, born in 1626, was the youngest son of the Earl of Berk- 
shire. He had been educated at Magdalene College, Oxford, 
was now member for Stockbridge, and had shown his literary 
tastes b}< publishing, in 1660, "A Panegyric to the King;" 
" Songs and Sonnets ; " " The Blind Lady, a Comedy ; " " The 
Fourth Book of Virgil's JEneid ; " " Statius his Achilleis, with 
Annotations; " and " A Panegyric to General Monk." Very 
complimentary lines b}^ Dryclen were prefixed to that volume. 
Sir Robert Howard, who was now one of the better dramatists 
of the time, must not be confounded with his contemporary, the 
Hon. Edward Howard, who wrote worse plays, whose poem 
of "The British Princes" (1669) became a jest of the wits, 
and whose verse the Earl of Dorset called the " solid non- 
sense that abides all tests." A friendship had been estab- 
lished between John Diyden and Sir Robert Howard. Diyden 
went with his friend to the Earl of Berkshire's house at Charl- 
ton, in Wiltshire, worked with him at "The Indian Queen," 
and won his sister Elizabeth for wife. The}' were married in 
December, 1663, and "The Indian Queen," all written in 
heroic couplets, was produced in the following month. T>vy- 
den's "Rival Ladies" had been written in blank-verse, with 
the tragic scenes in the heroic couplet. In the dedication of 
the published play (1664) to Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Dry- 
den discussed his, reasons for rhyme. 

Dryden's argument for rhyme is interesting for the evidence 
it gives of the depths into which blank-verse had fallen while 
Milton was using it for the measure of his "Paradise Lost." 
It should be remembered, that, with insignificant exception, 
blank-verse had never been used in our literature as the meas- 
ure of a great narrative poem. On both sides of the controversy 
it was being taken for granted that the measure was too mean 
for that ; the question was only whether its resemblance to 
common prose did not make it proper for the dialogue of plays. 
Dr} T den, following Corneille, though he repudiated a French 
influence, now began to argue that the dignity of tragedy de- 
manded rhyme. This was not, he said, a new way so much as 
an old way revived; "for many years before Shakespeare's 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEN. 433 

plays was the tragedy of ' Queen Gorboduc ' in English verse." 
Gorboduc was a king, not a queen ; and the play — except the 
choruses — was in blank-verse, not in rhyme, as Dryden sup- 
posed. But supposing, he went on, the way were new, " Shall 
we oppose ourselves to the most polished and civilized nations 
of Europe?" All the Spanish and Italian tragedies he had 
seen were in rlryrue ; for the French, he would not name them, 
because we admitted little from them but " the basest of their 
men, the extravagances of their fashions, and the frippery of 
their merchandise." Shakespeare, M to shun the pains of con- 
tinual rtryming, invented that kind of writing which we call 
blank-verse, but the French more property prose mesuree." 
Rlrvme leads to inversions, but not in a skilful writer, and if 
they be avoided it " has all the advantages of prose besides its 
own. But the excellence and dignity of it were never fully 
known till Mr. Waller taught it ; he first made writing easily 
an art ; first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in 
distichs, which in the verse of those before him runs on for so 
many hues together that the reader is out of breath to overtake 
it." Diyden was here one of the first to show that ignorance 
of our literature before the Commonwealth which characterized 
the English critics of the French school. Out of this ignorance 
arose false estimates which have passed from book to book, 
and would lead the unwaiy to suppose that the art of writing 
good English in all its forms was discovered by men who were 
alive to flatter one another in the reign of Charles II. Dryden 
then specified these advantages of rhyme over blank- verse, — 
(1) aid to memory ; (2) sweetness of rhyme adding grace to the 
smartness of a repartee ; and (3) that it bounds and circum- 
scribes the fancy, which, without it, tends to outrun the judg- 
ment. In 1665, Dryden produced with success a play of his 
own, " The Indian Emperor," a sequel to w The Indian Queen," 
but it was not published until 1667. In the same year, 1665, 
the Plague in London closed the theatres, and Dryden went to 
the house of his father-in-law, at Charlton, and there still dis- 
cussed rhyme and blank-verse with Sir Robert Howard. Diy- 
den's eldest son was born at Charlton, in 1665 or 1666, for he 
remained there in 1666, the year of the fire of London and of 



434 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

a great sea-fight with the Dutch. Both these events he cele- 
brated in a poem, " Annus Mirabilis," the wonderful year ; and 
his reply to his brother-in-law in discussion of the question of 
blank- verse, also written at Charlton, formed part of his ''Es- 
say of Dramatic Poesy." 

Dr} T den published his "Annus Mirabilis" in January, 1667, 
a heroic poem, in 1,216 lines of Davenant's heroic stanza, in 
which there is yet some trace of that taste for ingenious con- 
ceit, derived of old from Italy, which caused Mr. Pepjs's 
minister to say in his sermon that London had been reduced by 
the great fire from folio to decimo-tertio. But the vigor of a 
master's hand appears in this attempt of Dryclen's at heroic 
treatment of events yet fresh, dignifying the king's cause by 
the places given in the poem to Charles and his brother. In 
1667 appeared also Dryclen's " Essay of Dramatic Poesy," 
a dialogue between Eugenius (Charles Sackville, Lord Buck- 
hurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley), Crites (Sir Robert 
Howard), and Neander (Dryden). In June, 1665, he says, 
they went down the river towards Greenwich to hear the noise 
of cannon in, the sea-fight with the Dutch. As the sound 
seemed to recede they judged that the Dutch were retreating, 
and conversation turned on the plague of bad verse that would 
follow victory. So they passed to an argument on ancient 
and modern poets, soon limited to Dramatic Poesy. The dia- 
logue so introduced dealt with the subject of a play, " the famous 
rules which the French call Des Trois Unites," action, place, 
and time. Lisideius spoke of the beauty of French rhyme, 
and of the just reason he had to prefer that way of writing in 
tragedies before ours in blank-verse, and then the argument 
went through all its points. Crites reproduced Sir Robert 
Howard's case against rhyme. Neander answered "with all 
imaginable deference and respect, both to that person from 
whom you have borrowed your strongest arguments, and to 
whose judgment, when 1 have said all, I finally submit." In 
the year 1668, Sir Robert published his tragedy of "The 
Duke of Lerma," and took occasion in its preface to reply, on 
behalf of blank-verse, to the arguments of Dryden in his essa}^. 
The controversy amused polite readers, to whom it supplied 



To A. D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEN 435 

matter of talk, but there was not a trace in it of private quar- 
rel ; although Shad well afterwards, in a scurrilous attack on 
Drvden, said that he and his brother-in-law nearly fought. 

Dry den continued to earn mone}^ by writing for the stage. 
In March, 1667, his " Secret Love" was produced with success 
at the king's theatre, and printed next year. Nell Gwyn shone 
in it as Florimel. Diyden's " Sir Martin Mar-all," a version 
of Moliere's " L'Etourdi," was produced in the same year; 
and in 1668 " An Evening's Love; or, the Mock Astrologer," 
a careless version of the French corned}' " Le Feint Astro- 
logue," by Corneille's 3-ouiiger brother Thomas. In 1669 Diy- 
den produced a tragedy, called " Tyrannic Love ; or, the Royal 
Martyr," on the story of St. Catherine. In the prologue to 
this, he extended Horace's " serpit humi tutus " into 

" He who servilely creeps after sense 
Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence." 

He knew very well that he was often pleasing his audiences 
with ranted nonsense in heroic strain. Porphyrius defying the 
tyrant Maximin, at the end of the fourth Act, replied to him in 
this fashion : 

"Max. The Sight with which ray eyes shall first be fed 
Must be ray Empress and this Traitor's head. 

" Por. Where'er thou stands' t, I'll level at that place 
My gushing blood, and spout it at thy Face. 
Thus, not by Marriage, we our Blood will join: 
Xay, more, my Arms shall throw ray Head at thine." 

Diyden's next play was " Almanzor and Almahide ; or, the 
Conquest of Granada," in two parts, of which the first appeared 
in 1670. In 1672, Diyden printed his " Conquest of Granada," 
with an essa}- prefixed to it, " Of Heroick Plays." Here he 
assumed the question of rlryme in heroic plays to be settled by 
the fact that " very few Tragedies in this age shall be receiv'd 
without it." He gave Davenant the place of honor as origina- 
tor of the heroic pla} T , taking his music from Italian operas, and 
heightening his style from the example of Corneille. He said 
that his own plays, with love and valor for their proper theme, 
were based on principles of the heroic poem, and that he 
formed his much-abused Almanzor from Homer's Achilles, 
Tasso's Rinaldo, and Calprenede's Artaban. 



436 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

In 1673, when Settle published his " Empress of Morocco," Dryden 
wrote a poor tragedy to encourage public feeling against the Dutch after 
the breaking of the Triple Alliance. This was "Amboyna; or, the 
Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants." He printed also 
" Marriage a la Mode," acted the year before, in which he blended prose 
scenes with blank-verse again, as well as heroic couplets. Another play, 
produced in 1672, unsuccessfully, " The Assignation," was in prose, with 
a little blank-verse, chiefly in the last Act. In " Amboyna," the dialogue 
is chiefly a loose blank-verse printed as prose. In 1674, the year of Mil- 
ton's death, Dryden published — it was not acted — an opera based on 
his " Paradise Lost," called " The State of Innocence and Fall of Man." 
It is in heroic rhyme, with little provision for song, but much for ma- 
chinery and spectacle. The adaptation w T as made in good faith, but it is 
instructive to compare Milton's dialogue between Adam and Eve in 
their innocence with Dryden's endeavor to reproduce its effect on the 
minds of people who enjoyed the comedies of Etherege and Mrs. Behn. 
John Dryden was among those who had visited John Milton, for, in the 
preface to his ''Fables," Dryden quotes from a conversation with him. 
He is said to have asked Milton's leave to adapt "Paradise Lost," and 
to have been answered with a good-humored "Ay, you may tag my 
verses." In 1675, Dryden produced a heroic play, " Aureng-Zebe ; 
or, the Great Mogul," which remained popular. It was the last play 
written by him in heroic rhyme, and he expressed in its dedication to 
Lord Mulgrave -some weariness of play-writing, with a manifest feel- 
ing that he had not, as a dramatist, clone justice to himself. Instead of 
rhyming plays, he was hoping for leisure to rhyme a great poem. " If I 
must be condemn' d to rhime," he said, " I should find some ease in my 
change of punishment. I desire to be no longer the Sisyphus of the 
Stage; to rowl up a stone with endless labour (which, to follow the prov- 
erb, gathers no moss), and which is perpetually falling down again; I 
never thought myself very fit for an employment where many of my 
predecessors have excell'd me in all kinds; and some of my contempo- 
raries, even in my own partial judgment, have outdone me in comedy. 
Some little hopes I have yet remaining, and these too, considering my 
abilities, may be vain, that I may make the world some part of amends 
for many ill plays by an heroick poem. Your lordship has been long 
acquainted with my design, the subject of which you know is great, the 
story English, and neither too far distant from the present age, nor too 
near approaching it. Such it is, in my opinion, that I could not have 
wished a nobler occasion to do honour by it to my king, my country, and 
my friends ; most of our ancient nobility being concerned in the action. 
And your lordship has one particular reason to promote this undertak- 
ing, because you were the first who gave me the opportunity of discours- 
ing it to his Majesty and his Royal Highness. They were then pleas' d 
both to commend the design, and to encourage it by their commands. 
But the unset tledness of my condition has hitherto put a stop to my 



To A.D. 1700.I JOHN DRYDEN. 437 

thoughts concerning it. As I am no successor to Homer in his wit, so 
neither do I desire to be in his poverty. I can make no rhapsodies, nor 
go a-begging at the Grecian doors, while I sing the praises of their an- 
cestors. The times of Virgil please me better, because he had an Augus- 
tus for his patron. And to draw the allegory nearer you, I am sure I 
shall not want a Maecenas with him. 'Tis for your lordship to .stir up 
that remembrance in his Majesty, which his many avocations of business 
have caus'd him, I fear, to lay aside." This invocation is not equal to 
Milton's: 

" Chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer 
Before all temples the upright heart ami pure, 

Instruct me 

what in me is dark 

Illumine, what is low raise and support." 

But no heroic poem came of a looking up to the divine majesty of 
Charles II. 

After " Aureng-Zebe,' ' Dryden did cease for a time from writing 
plays, his next being in 1678, an ambitious revision of Shakespeare's 
" Antony and Cleopatra,'' as "All for Love; or, The World Well Lost." 
In his preface, he said, " I have endeavour'd in this play to follow the 
practice of the ancients, who, as Mr. Rymer has judiciously observed, 
are, and ought to be, our masters. ... In my stile I have profess' d to 
imitate the divine Shakespear; which, that I might perform more freely, 
I have disincumber'd myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my 
former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose." Dry- 
den's plays, in 1079, were " CEdipus," with Nathaniel Lee, and a recon- 
struction of Shakespeare's " Troilus and Cressida," both in blank-verse, 
with " Limberhaiu," a comedy in prose. The book of "Troilus and 
Cressida" hail not only a dedication, with incidental criticism, but also 
a " Preface to the Play," in which Dryden discussed at some length the 
grounds of criticism in tragedy. The critical discussions in the dedica- 
tions and prefaces to Dryden's published plays greatly assisted the sale of 
his play-books, and, when printed by themselves, they sIioav their strength 
as by far the best and most characteristic criticism upon forms of poetry 
produced during the reign of Charles II. In the preface to " Troilus and 
Cressida " Dryden no longer disdained a servile creeping after sense, but 
wrote, " 'Tis neither height of thought that is discommended, nor pa- 
thetic vehemence, nor any nobleness of expression in its proper place; 
but 'tis a false measure of all these, something which is like 'em and is 
not them: 'tis the Bristol stone which appears like a diamond" — 
(" Evitons ces faux brillants," Boileau had said) — " 'tis an extravagant 
thought, instead of a sublime one; 'tis roaring madness, instead of vehe- 
mence; and a sound of words instead of sense " — (" Tout doit tendre 
au bon sens," Boileau had said). Dryden felt the genius of Shakespeare, 
had a sense even of smallness in the wit of what he held to be his own 
more refined age ; and if there had been the strength of Dryden in many 
writers, our literature would have profited by the just demand for good 



438 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

sense in poetry as a re-action from the Later Euphuism, without losing 
height of thought, pathetic vehemence, or nobleness of expression. But 
the times, and his relation to them, gave Dryden little opportunity of 
touching the ideal that lay only half recognized within him. In Decem- 
ber, 1679, he was waylaid and cudgelled by ruffians, employed, it was 
believed, by the Earl of Rochester, who wrongly supposed him to have 
had a hand in Lord Mulgrave's " Essay on Satire," which contained sharp 
lines not only on Rochester, but also on the vices of the king. In 1679 
Dryden' s salary and pension began to fall into arrears, and continued to 
do so during the next four years. In 1680 he published a translation of 
the " Epistles of Ovid," by various hands besides his own. In the spring 
or summer of 1681, Dryden produced a play addressed to the popular 
feeling of the day against the Roman-Catholic priesthood, called " The 
Spanish Friar; or, the Double Discovery." It has earned special praise 
for the dramatic skill with which it makes an underplot unite with the 
main action of the piece. 

It was in the autumn of 1681 that Dryden aided the king 
in his conflict with the Earl of Shaftesbury, by writing a politi- 
cal pamphlet in verse, his satire of " Absalom and Aehito- 
phel." Its aim was to assist in turning a current of opinion 
against Shaftesbury ; to secure, as far as pamphlet could, the 
finding of a tru"e bill against him. The satire appeared anony- 
mously, on the 17th of Xovember, 1681. The accident of a 
second poem has caused this to be known as the first part of 
41 Absalom and Aehitophel," but it is a complete work. Mon- 
mouth as Absalom, and Shaftesbury as Aehitophel, had occurred 
before in the paper war ; and the use of such allegory was an 
appeal to the religious feeling of a people among whom those 
most likely to follow Shaftesbury were those most likely to be 
persuaded by a Scripture parallel. Charles, therefore, was 
David ; Cromwell, Saul ; the Duke of Buckingham figured as 
Zimri ; Titus Oates, as Corah ; the Roman Catholics were Jebu- 
sites ; the Dissenters, Levites ; and so forth. The argument of 
the poem was to this effect. The outcry over the asserted 
Popish plot gave heat to faction, and of this Shaftesbury took 
advantage. He reasoned thus and thus, to persuade Monmouth 
to rebellion ; Monmouth, answering thus and thus, yielded to 
the persuasion. Who were the lesser associates in this rebel- 
lion, the sprouting heads of the hydra? Here followed sketches, 
from life, of other leaders of the opposition, and among them 



To A.D. 1700.I JOHN DRTDEN. 439 

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, as Zimri. Monmouth 
appealed thus and thus to the people. The rebellion grew. 
What friends had King Charles? Here followed sketches of 
some of the chief friends of the king. Next came counsel 
of the king's friends ; and then the poem ended with the king's 
own purpose, expressed in David's speech. I have been, he 
said, forgiving till they slight my clemency. " 'Tis time to 
show I am not good by force." 

" Oh that my power to saving were confined! 
Why am I forced, like Heaven, against my mind 
To make examples of another kind ? 
Must I at length the sword of justice draw ? 
Oh, cnrst effects of necessary law! 
How ill my fear they by my mercy scan! 
Beware the fury of a patient man. 
Law they require : let Law then show her face. 



He said: the Almighty, nodding, gave consent, 
And peals of thunder shook the firmament. 
Henceforth a series of new time began, 
Tbe mighty years in long procession ran; 
Once more the godlike David was restored, 
And willing nations knew their lawful lord." 

The success of the satire as a poem was all it deserved to be. 
At once vigorous and highly finished, its characters of the chief 
men on either side, its lines and couplets, neatly fitted to ex- 
press much that the king's part}* had to say, were quoted and 
parodied, praised and abused. Two dozen lines repaid Buck- 
ingham's " Rehearsal" fifty-fold, if Dryden thought at all — as 
probably he did not — of a mere jest of the stage, when dealing 
with a vital question that seemed to have brought the nation 
once more to the verge of civil war, and writing what might 
help to send the chief opponent of Charles to the scaffold. 
The literal*}' triumph was great, but that was all. The prophecy 
of the closing lines was not fulfilled. The poem was published 
on the 17th of November. On the 24th the indictment was 
presented to the grand jury at the Old Bailey, and returned 
ignored. There were great public rejoicings, and a medal was 
struck to commemorate the triumph. 



440 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

The medal struck to commemorate the rejection of the bill 
against Shaftesbury was the subject of Dryden's next piece in 
this series, "The Medal: a Satire against Sedition. By the 
Author of ' Absalom and Achitophel.' " It was published early 
in March, 1G82, with a prefatory " Epistle to the Whigs." It 
was invective against Shaftesbury, blended with expression of 
Dryden's faith in the unity maintained by holding firmly to a 
fixed succession, and believing the inherent right of kings. 
" If true succession from our isle should fail," the various re- 
ligious sects, political parties, even individual men, would strive 
together : 

" Thus inborn broils the factions would engage, 
Or wars of exiled heirs, or foreign rage, 
Till halting vengeance overtook our age, 
And our wild labors, wearied into rest, 
Reclined us on a rightful monarch's breast." 

The only temperate reply was that of Samuel Pordage. Dry- 
den had dwelt on Shaftesbury, whose image was upon the 
obverse of the medal. On the reverse side was the Tower, and 
Pordage took this for his text in "The Medal Revers'd : a 
Satyre against Persecution. — By the Author of £ Azaria and 
Hushai.' " To complete the parallel, this opened with an intro- 
ductoiy epistle to the Tories. D^den was still recognized as 
" Our Prince of Poets," and there was nothing harder said of 
him than that he was on the side of the strong with Cromwell, 
and is so again with Charles. He found on one side of the 
medal Sedition under a statesman's gown. Reverse the medal, 
and upon the other side there is an image of the Tower, badge 
of as bad a hag, Persecution : 

" Let then his satire with Sedition fight, 
And ours the whilst shall Persecution bite ; 
Two hags they are, who parties seem to make : 
'Tis time for satires them to undertake. 
See her true badge, a prison or the Tower; 
For Persecution ever sides with Power." 

Very different in its character was Shadwell's answer, "The 
Medal of John Bayes : a Satyr against Folly and Knavery." 
This also had its introductory epistle to the Tories ; but not 
dealing at all with the great controversy before the nation, it 



To A. D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEN. 441 

was a savage personal attack on Drj'den. As for the verses, 
in some parts unutterably coarse, let their closing triplet indi- 
cate their tone : 

" Pied thing! half wit! half fool! and for a knave 
Few men than this a better mixture have: 
But thou canst add to that, coward and slave." 

This brutal attack provoked a delicate revenge. In October, 
1682, appeared " Mac Flecknoe. By the Author of ' Absalom 
and Achitophel.' " This was a mock heroic in rhymed coup- 
lets, setting forth how that aged prince, Richard Flecknoe, an 
Irish writer who had died about four }~ears before, and who 

" In prose and verse was owned without dispute 
Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute," 

chose in his last days Shadwell for successor : 

" Shadwell alone of all my sons is he 
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. 
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, 
But Shadwell never deviates into sense." 

The coronation of Shadwell was in the Nursery at Barbican, a 
theatre established in 1662 for the training of children to the 
stage ; and there he swore " Ne'er to have peace with wit, nor 
truce with sense." There he received the sceptre, and was 
crowned with poppies, and "on his left hand twelve reverend 
owls did fly." Then, in prophetic mood, Flecknoe blessed and 
counselled his successor, till he was, after the manner of Sir 
Formal Trifle, in Shad well's "Virtuoso," let down through a 
trap-door while yet declaiming : 

"Sinking he left his drugget robe behind, 
Borne upwards by a subterranean wind. 
The mantle fell to the young prophet's part 
With double portion of his father's art." 

In November, 1682, appeared the " Second Part of Absalom 
and Achitophel," to which Dryden contributed only two hun- 
dred lines (11. 310 to 509), containing a few character sketches, 
among which by far the most prominent are Elkanah Settle as 
Doeg, and Shadwell as Og. In November, 1682, another poem 
by Diyclen appeared, ("A Layman's Religion") " Religio 
Laid," in the style of Horace's Epistles, being a letter written 



442 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

originally to a young man, Hemy Dickinson, who had trans- 
lated Father Simon's "Critical History of the Old Testament." 
This expression of Dryden's mind upon religion, in 1682, 
should be impartially compared with that in "The Hind and 
the Panther," written five years later, when he became a Roman 
Catholic. " Religio Laici " was addressed to the translator of 
a Roman Catholic book on the Old Testament, which is de-' 
scribed hy Dryden as a "matchless author's w T ork." In the 
preface and in the poem Diyden modestly dissented from the 
preface to the Athanasian Creed, which excluded the heathen 
from salvation. He took his place in the preface between the 
Roman Catholics as Papists and the Nonconformists, believing 
that there was continuous endeavor to restore the Pope's au- 
thority over the King of England. 

In the poem so introduced, Dryden argued that Reason is but the dim 
light of moon and stars, which is lost when the sun rises: 

" So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight, 
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light." 

He argued that before revelation the best men had but imperfect notions 
of the highest good, that Deism had unconsciously borrowed from reve- 
lation that sense of the One God to be worshipped by praise and prayer, 
and of a future state, which it believed Reason to have discovered. He 
passed to the scheme of redemption expressed in the Bible, and, from 
objections of the Deist that "no supernatural worship can be true," and 
that millions have never heard the name of Christ, he took occasion to 
express his faith that 

" Those who followed Reason's dictates right, 
Lived up, and lifted high their natural light, 
With Socrates may see their Maker's face, 
While thousand rubric-martyrs want a place." 

He argued that no church could be an omniscient interpreter of Scrip- 
ture, and that the Scriptures themselves might be corrupted, but 

" Though not everywhere 
Free from corruption, or entire or clear, 
Are uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, entire, 
In all things which our needful faith require." 

He argued that it was for the learned to sift and discuss the doctrines 
drawn out of the Bible, but 

" The unlettered Ctrristian, who believes in gross, 

Plods on to heaven, and ne'er is at a loss : 

For the strait gate would be made straiter yet 

Were none admitted there but men of wit." 



ToA.D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEN 443 

If the Bible had been handed down from the past by the church of the 
Roman Catholics, 

" The welcome news is in the letter found; 
The carrier's not commissioned to expound." 

Once the clergy had traded with it on the ignorance of the people ; now 
the ignorance of the people had made it the common prey : it was mis- 
used with great zeal and little thought. 

" So all we make of Heaven's discovered will 
Is not to have it or to use it ill. 
The danger's much the same, on several shelves 
If others wreck us or we wreck ourselves." 

What remained, then, but the middle'way between these shoals? 

" In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way 
To learn what unsuspected ancients say; 
For 'tis not likely we should higher soar 
In search of heaven than all the church before : 
Nor can we be deceived unless we see 
The Scripture and the Fathers disagree. 



And after hearing what our church can say, 
If still our reason runs another way, 
That private reason 'tis more just to curb 
Than by disputes the public peace disturb. 
For points obscure are of small use to learn : 
But common quiet is mankind's concern." 

So the poem ended with the desire for peace by resting on authority, and 
Dryden's "Religio Laid," instead of being an antagonist work, is a 
natural prelude to " The Hind and the Panther." Under the tumult of 
the time the religious mind of Dryden was steadily on its way to the 
form of Catholicism in which he died. 

In February, 1682, when Southern's first play, "The Loyal Brother," 
was acted, Dryden wrote prologue and epilogue to it. It was the begin- 
ning of a friendship. Dryden raised the price of his prologue on this 
occasion. "The players," he said, "have had my goods too cheap." 
In December of the same year, 1682, he produced his tragedy of "The 
Duke of Guise" written with Lee. It was designed to apply the story 
of the French League to the English opposition of that day. With the 
same allusion he made a " Translation of Maimbourg's History of the 
League," and published it in 1684. In 1683 he had contributed a Pref- 
ace and a Life to a new translation of "Plutarch" by several hands. 
Dryden suggested and edited, in 1684, a volume of " Miscellany Poems. 
— Containing a New Translation of Virgil 1 s Eclogues, Ovid's Love 
Elegies, Odes of Horace and other Authors; with several Original 
Poems, by the most Eminent Hands." This revival of the old Eliza- 
bethan plan of gathering into one volume papers of verse from various 
hands was successful. The volume of 1684 was the first of a new series 
of such Miscellanies. In this volume itself the chief original poems 



444 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

were reprints — "Mac Flecknoe," "Absalom and Achitophel," and " The 
Medal." The translations were by Diyden, Sedley, Lord Koscommon, 
the Late Earl of Rochester, Otway, Rymer, Tate, Sir Carr Scrope, 
George Stepney, Thomas Creech, Richard Duke, Mr. Adams, Mr. Chet- 
wood, Mr. Stafford, and Mr. Cooper. 

In 16S5, Dryden published, still with Tonson, "Sylvse; or, The Sec- 
ond Part of Poetical Miscellanies.*' It contained translations by him- 
self from the "JEneid," from Lucretius, and from Theocritus and 
Horace, with short pieces, original, and translated by himself and others, 
including a Latin poem, by his eldest son Charles, on Lord Arlington's 
gardens. 

Diyden obtained the license for his " Hind and Panther," a 
defence of the Roman Catholic religion, only a week after the 
issue of the Declaration of Indulgence, in April. 1687. It was 
being read and talked of when the king, who had in case of 
need an army encamped on Hounslow Heath, received on the 
3d of July a Papal nuncio with great pomp at Windsor ; and 
next day a proclamation in " The London Gazette" dissolved 
the prorogued Parliament. The publication of ;t The Hind and 
the Panther ' ' was deliberately timed to aid King James in his 
scheme of a Catholic re-action. It dealt as distinctly as " Ab- 
salom and Achitophel" did in its day with the essential ques- 
tion of the hour ; but the point of view was honestly Diyden' s. 
James was not liberal to Dryden. In the renewal of his offices 
of laureate and historiographer, the annual butt of canary had 
been subtracted from his pay, and the renewal of the pension 
of a hundred pounds, which lapsed at the death of Charles, was 
neglected for twelve months after the new king's accession. 
There was no bribe, direct or indirect; and Dryden was the 
reverse of a time-server in staying by King James when nearly 
all his friends were leaving him, and prudently trimming their 
sails to meet the inevitable change of wind. But Dryden had his 
own convictions, and was true to them. He said in his preface 
to "The Hind and the Panther," "Some of the Dissenters, 
in their addresses to his Majesty, have said % that he has 
restored God to his empire over conscience.' I confess I 
dare not stretch the figure to so great a boldness ; but I may 
safely say that conscience is the nyyalty and prerogative of 
eveiy private man." He had said as much in the "Religio 



ToA.D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEX. 445 

Laici," and the spirit of charity in that poem remained unal- 
tered in "The Hind and the Panther." This argument for Ca- 
tholicism is in three parts, and is the longest of Dryden's poems. 
The milk-white Hind is the Church of Rome ; the Panther is 
the Church of England, " fairest creature of the spotted kind." 

u A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged, 
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged ; 
Without unspotted, innocent within, 
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin." 

The other beasts had no good-will to her ; and Independent, 
Presbyterian, Quaker, Freethinker, Anabaptist, Arian, are fig- 
ured under bear, wolf, hare, ape, boar, fox. Then Drydcn 
argues on with little heed to any fable, merely hindered by his 
clumsy animal machinery where his desire is for direct argu- 
ment. 

After the Revolution of 1688, and the accession of William 
and Mary in February, 1689, Dryden, remaining loyal to King 
James II., and to his adopted faith, was unable to obey the 
Act which required oaths of allegiance and supremac}' to be 
taken by all holders of office before August 1, 1689. Dryden, 
therefore, suffered in his way, with the non-juring clergy, and 
lost his offices of poet-laureate and historiographer. 

Obliged to return to the stage as a source of income, he produced in 
1690 his tragedy of "Don Sebastian " in blank-verse, with a little prose, 
and in the same year a comedy, " Amphitryon," following Moliere, with 
music by Henry Purcell, an excellent musician, and one of the organists 
of the Chapel Royal, who died of consumption in 1695, at the age of 
thirty-seven. Purcell also supplied the music for Dryden's " King 
Arthur; or, the British Worthy," written in 1685, and produced as a 
dramatic opera in 1691. With a quiet touch of good-humored satire, 
Dryden said in the preface to this attempt at what he called "the fairy 
way of writing:" "Not to offend the present times, nor a government 
which has hitherto protected me, I have been obliged so much to alter 
the first design, and take away so many beauties from the writing, that 
it is now no more w T hat it was formerly than the present ship of the 
' Royal Sovereign,' after so often taking down and altering, is the 
vessel it was at the first building;" and to deserved praise of the genius 
of Purcell he added, " In reason my art on this occasion ought to be 
subservient to his." In May, 1692, Dryden produced his tragedy of 
"Cleomenes; or, the Spartan Hero," finished for him by his friend 
Thomas Southern, In 1694, Dryden produced his last play, "Love 



446 MANUAL OF. ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

Triumphant," a tragi-comedy, which was a failure. In its prologue and 
epilogue he took leave of the stage, for he had now resolved to devote 
himself to a translation of Virgil. 

While writing his later plays, Diyden had received, in 
1692, a fee of five hundred guineas for a poem — " Eleonora " 
— in memoiy of the Countess of Abingdon ; and had written a 
44 Life of Polybius " to precede a translation by Sir Hemy 
Shere ; also a " Discourse on Satire," prefixed to a translation 
of "The Satires of Juvenal and Persius," translating himself 
Satires 1, 3, 6, 10, and 16, of Juvenal, and all Persius. He 
edited also, for Tonson, in 1693, a third volume of Miscella- 
nies, 44 Examen Poeticum : being the Third Part of Miscellany 
Poems. Containing Variet}' of New Translations of the An- 
cient Poets ; together with niany Original Poems by the Most 
Eminent Hands." This was a substantial volume, with an 
appendix of sevent\*-eight pages, separately paged, containing 
a translation by Tate of a famous poem by Fracastorius, upon 
a subject that all readers might not wish to find included in the 
volume. It opened with Dryden's translation of the First 
Book of "Ovid's Metamorphoses," included verse by Con- 
greve and Prior, much verse by Thomas Yalden, of Magdalene 
College, Oxford, then aged twenty-two, and a fellow-student 
of Addison's ; a translation of Virgil's first Georgic, dedicated 
to Dryden by Henry Sacheverell, another of Addison's college- 
friends ; and the first published writing of Joseph Addison 
himself, " To Mr. Dryden : by Mr. Jo. Addison ; " dated from 
Magdalene College, Oxford, June 2, 1693. Addison, aged 
twent}'-one, here exalted Dryden as a translator from the Latin 
poets. " Thy copy," he said, — 

" Thy copy casts a fairer light on all, 
And still outshines the bright original." 

In 1694, appeared the fourth and last of Dryden's series, as 
' k The Annual Miscellany: for the Year 1694. Being the 
Fourth Part of Miscellany Poems ; Containing Great Variety 
of New Translations and Original Copies, b} r the Most Eminent 
Hands." 

Again there was a good deal from Yalden, through whom probably 
Addison obtained his introduction to the Miscellany, and there was now 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN DRYDEN. 447 

more from young Addison. The volume, much thinner than its prede- 
cessor, opened with the "Third Book of Virgil's Georgicks, Englished 
by Mr. Dryden; " and that was immediately followed by " A Translation 
of all Virgil's fourth Georgick, except the Story of Aristseus. By Mr. 
Jo. Addison, of Magdalene College, Oxon." On other pages were, from 
the same hand, "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, at Oxford," and the 
"Story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, from the Fourth Book of 
Ovid's Metamorphoses;" and the book closed with "An Account of 
the Greatest English Poets, To Mr. H. S., April 3, 1G94. By Mr. 
Joseph Addison." " H. S." stood for Henry Sacheverell. 

In 1697, Dryden published his "Translation of Virgil," the 
subscription and Jacob Tonson's pa3~ment giving him about 
twelve hundred pounds for the work. In the fall of 1697, he 
wrote "Alexander's Feast," that Ode for St. Cecilia's day 
which was at once received as the best poem of its kind. It 
was written at request of the stewards of the Musical Meeting 
which had for some }*ears celebrated St. Cecilia's day, and it 
was first set to music by Jeremiah Clarke, one of the stewards 
of the festival. Early in 1698 Dryden prepared a new edition 
of Virgil, and was beginning to translate the "Iliad." In 
March, 1700, in fulfilment of a contract to give Tonson ten 
thousand verses for two hundred and fifty guineas, appeared 
Dryden's "Fables." These were modernized versions from 
Chaucer of " The Knight's Tale," " The Nun's Priest's Tale " 
(with the Fox a Puritan), and "The Wife of Bath's Tale," 
" The Flower and the Leaf," and " The Character of a Good 
Parson," adapted to Bishop Ken; versions from Boccaccio of 
" Sigismonda and Guiscardo," " Theodore and Honoria," and 
" Cymon and Iphigenia," with much translation from Ovid, and 
Dryden's version of the First Book of the " Iliad." Referring, 
in his preface, to attacks upon the immorality of his pla} T s, 
Dryden spoke severery of the impertinences of Sir Richard 
Blackmore ; but of Jeremy Collier he wrote : "I shall say the 
less, because in many things he has taxed me justly ; and I 
have pleaded guilt} T to all thoughts and expressions of mine 
which can be truly argued of obscenhVy, profaneness, or im- 
morality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him tri- 
umph ; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal 
occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of m}' repentance. It 



448 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, 
when I have so often drawn it for a good one." But of Col- 
lier's style Dryden added : " I will not say, ' The zeal of God's 
house has eaten him up ; ' but I am sure it has devoured some 
part of his good manners and civility." Dryden, afflicted with 
painful disease, was working to keep house, when his eldest 
son, Charles, who was at Rome, chamberlain of the household 
of Innocent XII., was obliged in 1698 to return to England 
an invalid. Dryden", laboring to meet the new expense thus 
caused, wrote to Tonson, "If it please God that I die of over- 
study, I cannot spend my life better than in preserving his." 
Early in 1700, when Vanbrugh revised Fletcher's comedy of 
" The Pilgrim" for Drury Lane, the profits of the third night 
were secured for his son Charles, b}* Diyden's addition to the 
piece of a Prologue and Epilogue, and a " Secular Masque " on 
the Close of the Seventeenth Century. About a month after 
the writing of the Prologue and Epilogue, Dryden died, on the 
1st of May, 1700. 

26. We now proceed to the stud} T of Dryden' s later contem- 
poraries. 

William Wycherley was born in 1640, at Clive, near 
Shrewsbury, where his father had some property. After his 
earliest schooling he was taught in France, and there became a 
Roman Catholic. At the Restoration he returned to England, 
became a fellow-commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, and was 
re-converted to Protestantism. He said afterwards that his first 
phiy, "Love in a Wood ; or, St. James's Park," was written 
at nineteen, when he had just left France ; and that he wrote 
"The Gentleman Dancing-Master " when he had been a 3-ear 
at Oxford. He was at sea with the Duke of York at the defeat 
of the Dutch off Lowestoft, in June, 1665. "Wycherley' s " Love 
in a Wood " was produced in 1672, and, together with his good 
looks, it won him the favor of the Duchess of Cleveland. His 
other play, written at college, "The Gentleman Dancing- 
Master," was produced in the following } T ear, 1673. His next 
acted play was not the next that he wrote, if, as some suppose, 
he had written "The Plain Dealer " just after his experience 
of the Dutch war, at the end of 1665, and had kept it by him in 



To A.D. 1700.] WILLIAM WYCHERLEY. 449 

doubt of the town's acceptance of its character of the Plain 
Dealer — Manly, "of an honest, surly, nice humor, supposed 
first, in the time of the Dutch war, to have procured the com- 
mand of a ship out of honor, not interest, and choosing a sea- 
life only to avoid the world." At any rate, "The Country 
Wife," written at the age of thirty-two, when his earlier 
plays began to appear on the stage, was produced with 
great success in 1G75. Then came, in 1G77, "The Plain 
Dealer" on the stage, and those were the four comedies of 
Wycherley, all produced in the reign of Charles II. He lived 
till 1715, but wrote no more plays. After the publica- 
tion of this play, Wycherley was in a bookseller's shop at 
Tunbridge Wells with a friend, Mr. Fairbeard, when a rich, 
handsome young widow, the Countess of Drogheda, came into 
the shop and asked for " The Plain Dealer." " Madam," said 
Mr. Fairbeard, since }x>u are for the Plain Dealer, there he is 
for you," and pushed Wycherley towards her. This introduc- 
tion led to their marriage. The lady proved a fond and jealous 
wife. She died soon, leaving Wycherley her fortune ; but his 
title to it was successfully disputed, he was ruined by law-suits, 
and spent the last 3-ears of the reign of Charles II. in a debtor's 
prison. James II., after witnessing a performance of "The 
Plain Dealer," rescued its author from prison by giving him a 
pension of two hundred pounds a year and offering to pa}' his 
elebts. But Wycherley did not venture to name all his debts, 
and left enough unpaid to weigh him down in after-life. 

Wycherley was the first vigorous writer of what has been 
called our prose comedy of manners. In the absence of all 
that poetry which lies in a perception of the deeper truths and 
harmonies of life, his pla} T s resemble other comedies of the later 
Stuart drama. There was little of it even in the metrical heroic 
plays. But Wycherlej-'s differ from other comedies of their 
time by blending with surface reflection of the manners of 
an evil time a larger, healthier sense of the humors of men, 
caught from enjoyment of Moliere. Wycherle} T 's best plays are 
founded upon Moliere — "The Country Wife" on " L'£cole 
des Femmes," and " The Plain Dealer " on " Le Misanthrope." 
They are not translations ; but in turns of plot and certain 



450 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

characters the direct and strong influence of Moliere is evident. 
Dry den and others borrowed from Moliere ; Wycherley was, 
in a way, inspired by him. He had not Moliere 's rare genius, 
and could not reproduce the masterly simplicity and ease of 
dialogue that is witty, and wise too, in every turn, while yet 
so natural as to show no trace of a strain for effect ; that is 
nowhere fettered to a false conventionality, but so paints 
humors of life as to be good reading forever, alike to the 
strong men and to girls and bo} T s. Our English writers of 
the prose comedy of manners cannot claim readers, like 
Moliere, from civilized Europe in all after-time ; but, as 
compared with other English dramatists of their own time, 
they did widen the range of character-painting — witness the 
widow Blackacre and her law-suit in ' ' The Plain Dealer ' ' — ■ 
and they did take pains to put substance of wit into their 
dialogue. Four dramatists are the chiefs of this school of 
prose comedy — Wycherle}', Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Far- 
quhar. Of these Wycherley came first, and wrote his four plan's 
in the reign of Charles II. His last play was acted sixteen 
years before the first of Congreve's. Congreve' s plays were 
all produced in the reign of William III., and those of Van- 
brugh and Farquhar in the reigns of William and of Queen 
Anne. 

27. William Congreve was of a Staffordshire family, and 
born in 1670. He was educated at Kilkenny and at Trinity 
College, Dublin ; entered the Middle Temple ; in 1693 pub- 
lished a novel, "Incognita; or, Love and Ditfy Reconciled," 
and at Drury Lane produced his play of " The Old Bachelor," 
which he professed to have written several years before "to 
amuse himself in a slow recovery from sickness." The 
success of the play was great, and it caused Charles Mon- 
tague, then a Lord of the Treasury, to make Congreve a 
commissioner for licensing hackney-coaches. In the following 
year, 1694, Congreve produced, with much less success, "The 
Double Dealer." The two theatres at Drury Lane and Lin- 
coln's Inn had joined their forces about 1682, and there was 
then only one great theatre, that at Drury Lane, with Thomas 
Betterton the greatest of its actors. Irritated b} r the patentees 



ToA.D. 1700.] GEORGE FARQUHAR. 451 

at Drury Lane, Betterton, then a veteran actor, sixty years 
old, seceded. He carried other good players with him, as 
well as the new dramatist, and obtained a patent for a new 
theatre, which opened in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1695, with 
Congreve's comedy of "Love for Love." This had a bril- 
liant success, and the company gave Congreve a share in 
the new house, on condition of his writing them a play a year 
if his health allowed. His next play appeared in 1697. It 
was his only tragedy, "The Mourning Bride," the most suc- 
cessful of his pieces. Afterwards, he wrote " The Way of the 
World," a comedy ; " The Judgment of Paris," a masque ; and 
" Semele," an opera; and in 1710, he published a complete 
edition of his works in three volumes. He died in 1729. 

28. Sir John Vanbrugh, born in 1666, was of a family 
that had lived near Ghent before the persecutions by the Duke 
of Alva. His grandfather came to England, and his father ac- 
quired wealth as a sugar-baker. After a liberal education, 
finished in France, Vanbrugh was for a time in the arm}', 
and in 1695 he was nominated b} T John Evelyn as secretary 
to the Commission for endowing Greenwich Hospital. His 
" Relapse," produced in 1697, was followed b} r " The Provoked 
Wife," produced in 1698 at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Other plaj-s 
of his are "JEsop," "The Pilgrim," "The False Friend," 
"The Confederacy," and "The Country House." He at- 
tained great note both as a dramatist and as an architect ; was 
knighted ; and died in 1726. 

29. George Farquhar, the son of a poor clergyman, was 
born at Londonderry in 1678. He left Trinity College, Dublin, 
to turn actor for a short time on the Dublin stage, came j'oung 
to London, and got a commission in a regiment under Lord 
Orrery's command in Ireland. Young Captain Farquhar was 
but twenty, when, in 1698, his first phiy, "Love and a Bottle," 
won success. Congreve's plays were the wittiest produced by 
writers of the new comedy of manners, but their keenness and 
fine polish were least relieved by any sense of right. Van- 
brugh' s style was less artificial and his plots were simpler, but 
his ready wit and coarse strength were as far as Congreve's 
finer work from touching the essentials of life. Farquhar had 



452 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

a generosity of character that humanized the persons of his 
drama with many traces of good feeling. He produced his 
"Inconstant" in 1703, "The Twin Rivals" in 1705, " The 
Recruiting Officer" in 1706, and his last and best play, " The 
Beaux Stratagem," written in six weeks when he was dying. 
He died, but twenty-nine years old, during the height of its suc- 
cess. A woman who loved Farquhar had entrapped him into 
marriage by pretending to possess a fortune. When undeceived, 
lie never in his life reproached her. From his death-bed he 
commended his two helpless daughters to his friend Wilks, the 
actor, who got them a benefit. His widow died in extreme 
poverty. One of his daughters married a poor tradesman, the 
other became a maid-servant. 

30. Thomas Southern, whom Dryden afterwards commended for 
his purity, was born in Ireland in 1660. He came to London in 1678, 
and at the age of eighteen entered the Middle Temple. He was but 
twenty-two when, in 1682, his tragedy of " The Loyal Brother; or, the 
Persian Prince," was acted. The controversy over the succession of 
the king's brother then ran high, and Southern, taking the side of the 
court, meant his play, of which the plot was from a novel, " Tachmas, 
Prince of Persia,'" to be taken as a compliment to James, Duke of York. 
It was followed, in 1684, by a comedy, "The Disappointment; or, the 
Mother in Fashion," which had a plot taken from the novel in "Don 
Quixote " of " The Curious Impertinent." Southern's best plays, both 
tragedies, were produced in the reign of William III. ; " The Fatal 
Marriage," in 1694, and "Oroonoko," founded on Mrs. Behn's novel, in 
1696. The play added new strength to the protest of the novel against 
slavery. Southern was an amiable man and a good economist. By his 
commissions in the army, which he entered early in James II. 's reign, 
his good business management as a dramatist, and careful investment 
of his money, he became rich, and lived to be a well-to-do, white-haired 
old gentleman, who died at the age of eighty-six in the year 1746. He 
was the introducer of the author's second and third night, which raised 
his profit from the players, and he was not above active soliciting, which 
brought in money from bountiful patrons of the theatre to whom he 
sold his tickets. He contrived even to make a bookseller pay a hundred 
and fifty pounds for the right of publishing one of his plays. When 
Dryden once asked him how much he made by a play, he owned, to 
Dryden' s great astonishment, that by his last play he had made seven 
hundred pounds. Dryden himself had been often content to earn a 
hundred. 

31. It was in the year 1679, that John Oldham wrote his satires on 



ToA.D. 1700.] THOMAS CREECH. 453 

Shipton, Gloucestershire. Oldham went to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, 
and returned home, after taking his B.A. degree, in 1C74. He became 
usher in a school at Croydon. Yerse written by him found its way to the 
Earls of Rochester and Dorset, and to Sir Charles Sedley, who astonished 
the poor usher by paying him a visit. He became tutor to two grand- 
sons of Sir Edwards Thurland, a judge living near Reigate, and then to 
the son of a Sir William Hickes, near London. This occupation over, he 
lived among the wits in London; was remembered as the poetical usher 
by Sedley and Dorset; was on affectionate terms with Dryden; and found 
a patron in the Earl of Kingston, with whom he was domesticated, at 
Holme Pierrepoint, when he died of small-pox, in December, 1683, aged 
thirty. His chief production was the set of four " Satyrs upon the Jes- 
uits," modelled variously on Persius, Horace, Buchanan's "Francis- 
can.'' and the speech of Sylla's ghost at the opening of Ben Jonson's 
" Catiline." The vigor of his wit produced a bold piece of irony in 
an " Ode against Virtue," and its " Counterpart," an ode in Virtue's 
praise, with many short satires and odes, — one in high admiration of 
Ben Jonson, — paraphrases and translations. There is a ring of friend- 
ship in the opening of Dryden's lines upon young Oldham's death before 
time had added the full charm of an English style to the strength of 
wit in his verse: 

" Farewell ! too little and too lately known, 
Whom I began to think and call ray own ; 
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine 
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine." 

32. Nahum Tate, joint author with Dryden of the Second Part of 
"Absalom and Achitophel," was born in Dublin, in 1652, the son of 
Dr. Faithful Tate, and educated at Trinity College there. He came to 
London, published in 1677 a volume of " Poems," and between that date 
and 1682 had produced the tragedies of "Brutus of Alba" and "The 
Loyal General; Richard II. ; or, the Sicilian Usurper;" an altered ver- 
sion of Shakespeare's " King Lear; " and an application of "Coriolanus " 
to court politics of the day, as " The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth; or, 
The Fall of Coriolanus." Tate wrote three other plays before the Revo- 
lution. It was not till 1696 that he produced, with Dr. Nicholas Brady 
(b. 1659, d. 1726), also an Irishman, and then chaplain to William 
III., a "New Version of the Psalms of David;" and in 1707 one more 
tragedy of his was acted, " Injured Love; or, The Cruel Husband." In 
1692, Tate became poet-laureate, and remained laureate during the rest 
of Dryden's life, and throughout Queen Anne's reign. 

33. George Stepney (b. 1663, d. 1707), wrote pleasant occasional 
verse. He was* educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, 
Cambridge, and owed his political employment after the Revolution to 
the warm friendship of a fellow-student, Charles Montague, afterwards 
Lord Halifax. 

34. Thomas Creech, born in 1659, near Sherborne, Dorset, studied 



454 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

at Wadham College, Oxford, and got a fellowship for his translation 
of Lucretius, published in 1682. In 1684, the year of the first volume 
of Miscellany Poems, Creech published a verse translation of the Odes, 
Satires, and Epistles of Horace, which did not sustain his credit, though 
he applied the satires to his own times. The end of his life was, that, in 
1701, Wadham College presented him to the rectory of Welwyn, and he 
hanged himself in his study before going to reside there. Richard 
Duke, also a clergyman, was a friend of Otway's, and tutor to the Duke 
of Richmond. He was part author of translations of Ovid and Juvenal, 
and also wrote original verses. He died in 1711, as Prebendary of 
Gloucester. 

35. Sir Samuel Garth, born of a good Yorkshire family about 1660, be- 
came M.D. of Cambridge in 1691, and Fellow of the London College of 
Physicians in 1693. He was a very kindly man, who throve both as wit 
and as physician; and he acquired fame by a mock-heroic poem, ''The 
Dispensary," first published in 1699. The College of Physicians had, in 
1687, required all its fellows and licentiates to give gratuitous advice to 
the poor. The high price of medicine was still an obstacle to charity; 
and after a long battle within the profession, the physicians raised, in 
1696, a subscription among themselves for the establishment of a dispen- 
sary within the college, at which only the first cost of medicines would 
be charged to the poor in making up gratuitous prescriptions. The 
squabble raised over this scheme, chiefly between physicians and apothe- 
caries, Garth, who was one of its promoters, celebrated in his clever 
mock-heroic poem. It was suggested to him, as he admitted, by Boi- 
leau's mock-heroic, " Le Lutrin," first published in 1674, which had for 
its theme a hot dispute between the treasurer and precentor of the 
Sainte Chapelle at Paris over the treasurer's wish to change the position 
of a pulpit. Garth, a good Whig, was knighted on the accession of 
George L, and was made one of the physicians in ordinary to the king. 
He wrote other verse, and died in 1719. 

36. John Pomfret, who died in 1703, aged thirty-six, was Rector of 
Maiden, and son of the Rector of Luton, both in Bedfordshire. His 
"Poems" appeared in 1699, the chief of them a smooth picture of 
happy life, " The Choice," first published as " by a Person of Quality." 
As one part of " The Choice " was " I'd have no Wife," it was prompt- 
ly replied to with "The Virtuous Wife; a Poem." William Walsh 
(b. 1663, d. 1708), whom Dryden, and afterwards Pope, honored as friend 
and critic, was the son of a gentleman of Worcestershire. He wrote 
verse, liked poets, was a man of fashion, and sat for his own county in 
several Parliaments. He published, in 1691, a prose " Dialogue concern- 
ing Women, being a Defence of the Fair Sex, addressed to Eugenia." 
William King (b. 1663, d. 1712) was born in London to a good estate, 
graduated at Oxford, became D.C.L. in 1692, and an advocate at Doctors' 
Commons. He acquired under William III. and Queen Anne the reputa- 
tion of a witty poet, who idly wasted high abilities and good aids to ad- 



To A.D. 1700.] GEORGE GRANVILLE. 455 

vancement in the world. In 1G99 he published a " Journey to London," 
as a jest upon Dr. Martin Lister's " Journey to Paris." In 1700 he satir- 
ized Sir Hans Sloane, then President of the Eoyal Society, in two dia- 
logues called " The Transactioner." At the end of William's reign, Dr. 
King obtained good appointments in Ireland. Thomas Brown, a witty 
and coarse writer of trifles, whose name afterwards as Tom Brown be- 
came very familiar in society, began his career towards the close of Charles 
II.'s reign. He was born in 1663, the son of a farmer, at Shiffnal, 
Shropshire; became a clever but discreditable student of Christchurch, 
Oxford ; acquired skill in French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as in Latin 
and Greek; was obliged by his irregularities to leave the university, and 
was schoolmaster for a time at Kingston-on-Thames. Then he came to 
London, lazy, low-minded, dissolute, and clever, to live as he could by 
his wit. He wrote satires, two plays, dialogues, essays, declamations, 
letters from the dead to the living, translations, etc. He died in 1704. 
George Granville (b. 1667, d. 1735), second son of Bernard Granville, 
and nephew to the first Earl of Bath, went early to Cambridge, wrote 
verse as an undergraduate, was at the Kevolution a young man of 
twenty-one, loyal to the cause of King James. Under William III. 
he lived in retirement and wrote plays: " The She-Gallants;" a 
revision of Shakespeare's " Merchant of Venice," as " The Jew of Yen- 
ice," with Shylock turned into a comic character; and "Heroic Love," 
a tragedy upon "Agamemnon and Chryseis." George Granville was 
made Lord Lansdowne, Baron Bideford, in 1711, when the Tories came 
into power. 



CHAPTER IX. 

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY : 
SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND MEN OF 

SCIENCE. 

1. Thomas Hoboes. — 2. James Harrington. — 3. Eager Spirit of Inquiry. —4. Group 
of Men of Science. — 5. Bobert Boyle. — 6. Bobert Hooke. — 7. John Bay. — S. 
Thomas Sprat. — 9. Thomas Sydenham. — 10. Sir Thomas Browne. — 11. Elias 
Ashmole. — 12. Sir Kenelm Digby. — 13. Sir Isaac Newton.— 14. Writers on 
Political Science; Thomas Mun ; Sir Josiah Child; Sir William Petty. — 15. 
Algernon Sidney. — 16. Izaak Walton. — 17. Balph Cudworth. — IS. John 
Locke. 

1. There was one man whose life ended in the Second Half 
of the Seventeenth Century, but began in the Second Half of 
the Sixteenth Century, and who was himself a representative 
of the three classes of writers embraced in the title of this 
chapter. We refer to Thomas Hobbes, who was born in 
April, 1588, son of a clergyman, at Malmesbury, in Wiltshire. 
As a schoolboy at Malmesbury he translated the ' ' Medea ' ' of 
Euripides from Greek into Latin verse. In 1603 he was entered 
to Magdalene Hall, Oxford ; and in 1608 became tutor to Wil- 
liam, Lord Cavendish, son of Lord Hardwicke, soon afterwards 
created Earl of Devonshire. In 1610, Hobbes travelled with 
his pupil in France and Italy. When he came home, Bacon, 
Lord Herbert of Cherbuiy, and Ben Jonson, were among his 
friends. In 1626 his patron died, and in 1628 the son whose 
tutor he had been died also. In that year Hobbes published 
his first work, a " Translation of Thucydides," made for the 
purpose of showing the evils of popular government. Ben 
Jonson helped in the revision of it. Hobbes next went to 
France as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, but was 
called back bj T the Countess Dowager of Devonshire to take 
charge of the young earl, then thirteen 3'ears old. In 1634 he 
went with his pupil to France and Italy, returned to England 

456 



To A.D. 1700.] THOMAS HOBBES. 457 

in 1637, and still lived at Chatsworth with the family he had 
now served for about thirty years. In 1636 he honored Derby- 
shire by publishing a Latin poem on the wonders of the Peak, 
44 De Mirabilibus Pecci." In 1641 Hobbes withdrew to Paris, 
and in 1642 published in Latin the first work setting forth his 
philosophy of society. It treated of the citizen — 4 4 Elementa 
Philosophica de Cive." Hobbes upheld absolute monarchy as 
the true form of government, basing his argument upon the 
principle that the state of nature is a state of war. In 1647 
Hobbes became mathematical tutor to Charles, Prince of Wales. 
In 1650, he published a treatise on 44 Human Nature ; or, the 
Fundamental Elements of Policy ; " and another, 44 De Corpore 
Politico; or, the Elements of Law, Moral and Politic." In 
the following year, 1651, appeared his 44 Leviathan ; or, the 
Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical 
and Civil." This book he caused to be written on vellum for 
presentation to Prince Charles ; but the divines were in arms 
against Hobbes for opinions which the}' considered hostile to 
religion. Upholder as he was of the supremac}* of kings, 
Charles naturally avoided him. No man can hurt religion by 
being as true as it is in his power to be ; and that Hobbes was. 
Our judgment of a man ought never to depend upon whether 
or not we agree with him in opinion. Hobbes was an independ- 
ent thinker, and retained his independence when he might 
have lapsed into the mere hanger-on of a noble house, or, by 
dwelling only on some part of his opinion, have looked for 
profit as a flatterer of royalty. At Chatsworth he gave his 
morning to exercise and paying respects to the family and its 
visitors ; at noon he went to his stud} T , ate his dinner alone 
without ceremon}', shut himself in with ten or twelve pipes of 
tobacco, and gave his mind free play. 

Hobbes's " Leviathan," "occasioned," he says, "by the disorders of 
the present time," is in four parts: 1, Of Man; 2, Of Commonwealth; 
3, Of a Christian Commonwealth; 4, Of the Kingdom of Darkness. 
Whatever can be compounded of parts Hobbes called a body; man, 
imitating nature, or the art by which God governs the world, creates 
" that great Leviathan called the Commonwealth or State, . . . which is 
but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the 
natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended." In this 



458 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

huge body the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion 
to all its parts. (1.) The matter and artificer of it is Man. Men are 
by nature equal, and their natural state is one of war, each being gov- 
erned by his own reason, and with a right to every thing that he can 
get. But he may agree to lay down this right; and be content with so 
much liberty against other men as he would like them to have against 
himself. Retaining certain natural rights of self-preservation, man 
makes a covenant which is the origin of government, and injustice then 
consists simply in breach of that covenant. (2.) For the particular 
security not to be had by the law of nature a covenant is made, which 
forms man into the Commonwealth, and is the basis of the rights and 
just power or authority of a sovereign, who becomes thenceforth as soul 
to the body. The subjects to a monarch thus constituted cannot 
without his leave throw off or transfer monarchy, because they are 
bound by their covenant. "And whereas," says Hobbes, "some men 
have pretended, for their disobedience to their sovereign, a new cove- 
nant, made not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: for there 
is no covenant with God but by mediation of somebody that represent- 
eth God's person; which none doth but God's lieutenant, who hath the 
sovereignty under God." (3.) Reason directs public worship of God, 
but since a Commonwealth is but as one person, it ought also to exhibit 
to God but one worship. There is no universal Church, because there 
is no power on earth to which all other Commonwealths are subject; but 
there are Christians in many states, each subject to the Commonwealth 
of which he is a member. It is the function of the constituted supreme 
power to determine what doctrines are fit for peace and to be taught the 
subjects. All pastors in a church exercise their office by Civil Right; 
the civil sovereign alone is pastor by Divine Right. The command of 
the civil sovereign, having Divine warrant, may be obeyed without for- 
feiture of life eternal; therefore, not to obey is unjust. All that is 
necessary to salvation is contained in Faith in Christ, and Obedience to 
Laws. (4.) The "Rulers of the Darkness of this World" are the con- 
federacy of deceivers, that, to obtain dominion over men in this present 
world, endeavor by dark and erroneous doctrines to extinguish in them 
the light both of Nature and of the Gospel, and so to disprepare them 
for the kingdom of God to come. 

Much of the detail in "Leviathan" and other writings led 
to a belief that the doctrines of Hobbes were destructive to 
Christianitj' and all religion. This was expressed by Dr. 
Bramhall, Bishop of Deny, in a book called "The Catching 
of Leviathan," to which Hobbes wrote an answer. Hobbes 
published, in 1G54, a treatise written in 1G52 ; " Of Liberty and 
Necessity: . . . wherein all Controversy concerning Predestina- 
tion, Election, Free-will, Grace, Merits, Reprobation, etc., is fully 



To A. D. 1700.] JAMES HARRINGTON. 459 

Decided and Cleared." Dr. Bramhall undertook to show him 
that on these points also he was to be by no means clear of 
con trovers}'. 

Living far into the reign of Charles II., he published, in 1675, 
a kk Translation of the Iliad and Odyssey " into English verse, 
after an experiment with four books of the " Odyssey " as 
"The Voyage of Ulysses." He died in 1679, at the age of 
ninet}'-one. In the year of his death appeared a Latin poem 
by him on his own "Life," written at the age of eighty-four, 
and his ' ' Behemoth : The History of the Causes of the Civil 
Wars of England, and of the Counsels and Artifices by which 
they were carried on, from the Year 1640 to the Year 1660." 
This is discussed in the form of a dialogue between A and B, 
and sets forth Hobbes's opinions on the place of the Roman 
Catholics, Presbyterians, and Independents, in their relation to 
the Civil War, upon ship-mone}', the action of the Long Par- 
liament and the Commonwealth, and other topics interesting to 
a philosophical inquirer with some strong opinions of his own. 

B says in the course of this dialogue that he should like " to 
see a system of the present morals, written by some divine of 
good reputation and learning and of the late king's party." 
"I think," A answers, "I can recommend unto you the best 
that is extant, and such a one as (except a few passages that I. 
mislike) is \ery well worth your reading. The title of it is, 
4 The Whole Duty of Man laid clown in a Plain and Familiar 
AY ay.' ' This popular book, with pikers appended, including 
a prayer for the church, and prayers '* for those who mourn in 
secret in these times of calamuYy," was first published in 1659, 
was translated into Welsh in 1672, into Latin in 1693, and has 
been attributed by different speculators to three archbishops, 
two bishops, several less dignified clergymen, and a lad} r . 

2. James Harrington, born in 1612, eldest son of Sir 
Sapcotes Harrington, was of a good Rutlandshire family. In 
1629 he entered as a gentleman commoner of Trinity College, 
Oxford. His father died before he was of age. He went to 
Holland, Denmark, Germany, and France, and to Italy, where 
he became an admirer of the Venetian Republic. After his 
return he lived a studious life, and was generous in care for his 



460 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

younger brothers and sisters. At the beginning of 1647 he 
was appointed to wait on Charles I., after his surrender to the 
English Commissioners, went with him from Newcastle, and 
was one of his grooms of the chamber at Holuiby House. The 
king preferred his company, talked with him of books and 
foreign parts, and was only a little impatient when Harrington, 
a philosophical republican, entertained his Majesty with a 
theory of an ideal Commonwealth. Harrington was with 
Charles in the Isle of Wight, but was afterwards separated 
from him because he would not take an oath against connivance 
at the king's escape. After the king's execution Harrington 
worked out his view of government in the book which he called 
" The Commonwealth of Oceana." Oceana was England, and 
he styled Scotland Marpesia, Ireland Panopasa, Hemy VII. 
Panurgus, Hemy VIII. Coraunus, Queen Elizabeth Parthenia, 
and so forth. Oceana being island, seems, said Harrington, 
like Venice, to have been designed by God for a Common- 
wealth : but Venice, because of its limited extent and want of 
arms, " can be no more than a Commonwealth for preservation ; 
whereas this, reduced to the like government, is a Common- 
wealth for increase." At the foundation of Harrington's theory 
was the doctrine that empire follows the balance of property. 
He began with a sketch of the principles of government among 
the ancients and among the moderns, arguing throughout that 
dominion is property, and that, except in cities whose revenue 
is in trade, the form of empire is determined b}- the balance of 
dominion or property in land. 

If one man be, like the Grand Turk, sole landlord, or overbalance the 
people three parts in four, his empire is Absolute Monarchy. If the 
nobility be the landlords, or overbalance the people to the like propor- 
tion, that is the Gothic balance, and the empire is Mixed Monarchy, as 
that of Spain or Poland, and of Oceana till " the Statute of Alienations 
broke the pillars by giving way to the nobility to sell their estates." If 
the whole people be landlords, or hold the lands so divided that no one 
man or small body of men overbalance them, the empire (unless force 
intervene) is a Commonwealth. Any possible attempt to maintain gov- 
ernment in opposition to this principle leads, said Harrington, to dis- 
order. Where a nobility holds half the property, and the people the 
other half, the one must eat out the other, as the people did the nobility 
in Athens, and the nobility the people in Rome. After illustrating this 



To A.D. 1700.] JAMES HARRINGTON. 461 

position, Harrington cited, under feigned names, nine of the most 
famous forms of legislation known in history; and out of what he took 
to be the good points of each, with additions and modifications of his 
own invention, he produced a Council of Legislators and a Model Com- 
monwealth for his Oceana. Olphaus Megaletor (Oliver Cromwell), " the 
most victorious captain and incomparable patriot," general of the army, 
was made by its suffrage Lord Archon of Oceana; fifty select persons 
sat as a Council to assist him. The materials of a Commonwealth are 
the people ; these the Lord Archon and his Council divided into freemen 
or citizens, and servants. The servants were not to share in the govern- 
ment until able to live of themselves. The citizens were divided into 
youths (from eighteen to thirty) and elders; also, according to their 
means, into horse and foot; and, according to their habitations, into 
parishes, hundreds, and tribes. A thousand surveyors, each with a dis- 
trict assigned to him, " being every one furnished with a convenient 
proportion of urns, balls, and balloting-boxes (in the use whereof they 
had been formerly exercised), and now arriving each at his respective 
parishes, began with the people by teaching them their first lesson, 
which was the ballot; and though they found them in the beginning 
somewhat froward, as at toys, with which (while they were in expectation 
of greater matters from a Council of Legislators) they conceived them- 
selves to be abused, they came within a little while to think them pretty 
sport, and at length such as might very soberly be used in good earnest." 
Then followed an account of the machinery of balloting in each parish 
for deputies, only the elders being the electors; of balloting also for the 
new pastor by the elders of the congregation in every parish church, 
with provision saving the rights of all Dissenters; and for the election 
of justices and high constables, captains and ensigns, coroners and jury- 
men, by ballot, among deputies of the parishes, and so throughout; "the 
ballot of Venice, as it is fitted by several alterations, to be the constant 
and only way of giving suffrage in this Commonwealth." The method 
of voting by ballot in the national Senate was illustrated by a picture. 

The full scheme of a Commonwealth was worked out in the 
"Oceana" with much detail. Harrington's manuscript was 
seized and carried to Whitehall, but pleasantly recovered by 
appeal to Cromwell through his daughter Lad} r Chiypole, and 
published in 1656, inscribed "to His Highness, the Lord 
Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and 
Ireland." Like all books that represented the activity of inde- 
pendent thought on the great questions of the day, Harrington's 
" Oceana" produced pamphlets in attack and .in defence. Its 
chief opponents were Dr. Henry Feme, afterwards Bishop of 
Chester, and Matthew Wren, one of the votaries of experi- 



462 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

mental science, out of whose meetings the Royal Society was 
presently to spring, and of whom Harrington said they had 
" an excellent faculty of magnifying a Flea, and diminishing a 
Commonwealth." Partly to the opinions of Hobbes, and partly 
to those of Harrington, Richard Baxter opposed his " Holy 
Common wealth." Harrington published an abridgment of his 
political scheme in 1659, as ' w The Art of Lawgiving;" and 
established, in the latter da}*s of the Commonwealth, a club 
called the 4t Rota," which met at the ' k Turk's Head," kept by 
one Miles, in the New Palace Yard, Westminster, and sat 
round an oval table, with a passage cut in the middle of it hy 
which Miles delivered his coffee. The Rota discussed prin- 
ciples of government, and voted by ballot. Its ballot-box was 
the first seen in England. Milton's old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, 
was one of the members of this Club, which was named from a 
doctrine of its supporters, that in the chief legislative body a 
third part of the members should rote out by ballot every year, 
and be incapable for three years of re-election ; by which prin- 
ciple of rotation Parliament would be completely renewed every 
ninth year. Magistrates also were to be chosen for only three 
3'ears, and, of course, b} T ballot. Harrington died in 1677. 

3. Everywhere there was in those days the quickened spirit 
of inquiry. It entered into politics ; and patriotic thinkers, 
representing manj- forms of mind, active in fresh examination 
of the framework of society, sought to find their way to the 
first principles on which established forms of government are 
founded, and to part the false from the true. It entered into 
religion ; and devout men, also representing man}' forms of 
mind, went straight to the Bible as the source of revealed 
truth, seeking to find their way to the first principles on which 
established forms of faith are founded. It entered into science ; 
and followers of Bacon, hoping to draw wisdom from the 
work of the All- wise, went straight to Nature as the source 
of all our material knowledge, and sought, by putting aside 
previous impressions where they interfered with a new search 
for truth, to find their way to the first principles upon which a 
true science is built. 

4. These men of science, who were drawn together in the time of 



To A.D. 1700.] MEN OF SCIENCE. 463 

the Civil War, were active still under the Commonwealth, and under 
Charles II. There was Robert Boyle, with a special turn for chemical 
investigation, and an ever-present sense of God in nature. During the 
Commonwealth it was chiefly at Boyle's house, in Oxford, with his sister, 
Lady Ranelagh, for hostess, that the knot of associated men of science 
had their meetings. There was Samuel Hartlib, one of the first to 
suggest fellowship in the pursuit of knowledge, a foreigner who spent 
his whole fortune for the well-being of England, and was still at work 
under the Commonwealth, issuing practical books that taught the Eng- 
lish farmer to improve his crops. Hartlib' s services were recognized by 
Cromwell with a pension of three hundred pounds a year. This ceased 
at the Restoration, and Hartlib died poor and neglected. There was 
John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, who prepared 
the way for Newton. Newton's binomial theorem was a corollary of 
the results of Wallis on the quadrature of curves. Wallis published, in 
1655, his chief mathematical work, " Arithmetica Infinitorum," with a 
prefixed treatise on Conic Sections. Thomas Hobbes, who swam out 
of his depth in mathematics, supposed himself to have squared the 
circle. Wallis commented on this in his " Elenchus Geometric Hob- 
biame." Hobbes, who never took contradiction well, retorted with 
"Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics at Oxford." Wallis re- 
plied, in 1656, with "Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes; or, School Disci- 
pline for not saying his Lesson right." Hobbes rejoined with " Marks of 
the Absurd Geometry, etc., of Dr. Wallis;" and the controversy went 
on for some time, Wallis being in the right, and also cleverer than 
Hobbes in conduct of the controversy. The best of his retorts was 
" Hobbius Heautontimorumenos " (named from one of the comedies 
of Terence), published in 1662. Wallis lived till 1703. Another of 
these comrades in science w r as John Evelyn, born in 1620, the son of 
Richard Evelyn, of Wotton, Surrey. Evelyn loved art and nature, 
had ample means, left England because of the Civil War, and travelled 
in France and Italy ; came home in 1651 with his fair and clever wife, 
and amused himself with the laying out of his famous gardens at 
Sayes Court, quietly holding stout Royalist opinions, and avoiding a 
pledge to the Covenant. In 1659 he sketched a plan of a philosophi- 
cal college, and published also an "Apology for the Royal Party." 
There was also, as Evelyn calls him, that most obliging and univer- 
sally curious Dr. Wilkins, who had wonderful transparent apiaries; 
a hollow statue which spoke through a concealed tube; also " a variety 
of shadows, dials, perspectives, and many other artificial, mathematical, 
and magical curiosities, . . . most of them of his own and that pro- 
digious young scholar, Mr. Chr. Wren." Young Christopher Wren, 
nephew of the Bishop of Ely, was also in fellowship among these fol- 
lowers of science. There was William Petty (knighted in 1661), born 
in 1623, son of a clothier at Romsey, educated at the Romsey Grammar 
School, and Caen, in Normandy. He began active life with some expe- 



464 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

rience in the navy, then, after 1643, was in France and the Netherlands 
for three years, and studied medicine and anatomy. In 1648 he pub- 
lished " The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advance- 
ment of some Particular Parts of Learning," that is, the extension of 
education to objects more connected with the business of life. He went 
to Oxford, taught anatomy and chemistry, became in 1649 M.D. and 
Fellow of Brazenose. Some of the first scientific gatherings were in 
his rooms. In 1652 he was physician to the army in Ireland; in 1654 
he obtained a contract for the accurate survey of lands forfeited by the 
rebellion of 1641, by which he made ten thousand pounds while insti- 
tuting the first scientific survey of Ireland. 

5. Of the men of science just named, we must recall one, 
Robert Boyle, for more particular mention. He was the sev- 
enth son of the Earl of Cork, and was born in 1627. He was 
educated at Eton, then at Geneva. When his father died, in 
1643, Robert Boyle returned to England. By advice of his 
sister, Lady Ranelagh, he shunned the strife of parties, and 
devoted himself to stud} 7 . Lady Ranelagh, having become a 
widow, added her income to Robert's, and kept house for him. 
In 1644, Robert Boyle became a friend of Hartlib' s, and en- 
tered heartily into his beneficent schemes. He became also a 
friend of Milton's, for Lady Ranelagh sent her son and her 
nephew, the Earl of Barrimore, to Milton's school. In Robert 
Boyle the fresh study of nature quickened love of God ; his 
scientific thought was blended with simple and deep religious 
feeling. In 1648 he wrote, but did not publish until 1660, a 
letter on " Seraphic Love," addressed to a young " Lindamor " 
disappointed in courtship ; a commendation to him of that 
purely spiritual love to which both Christianity and Platonism 
invited men. In the latter year, he also published " New Ex- 
periments Plrysico-mechanical, touching the Spring of the Air 
and its Effects ; made for the most part in a New Pneumatical 
Engine." These were experiments made with the air-pump, a 
contrivance first suggested, about 1654, by Otto von Guericke, 
a magistrate of Magdeburg, but more perfectly worked out, in 
1658 or 1659, b}' Robert Bo3'le, with the help of his friend Robert 
Hooke. From this time onward, his publications continued to 
witness to his active interest in science. In 1661 he published 
considerations on the conduct of experiments, and some more 



To A.D. 1700.I ROBERT BOYLE. 465 

experiments of his own, in "Certain Physiological Essays;" 
published, also, his u Sceptical Chemist," in argument against 
those short-sighted philosophers who ' ' are wont to endeavor to 
evince their salt, sulphur, and mercury to be the true principles 
of things." In 1663 he published " Some Considerations 
touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosoplry," 
and " Experiments and Considerations touching Colors," also 
k - Some Considerations touching the Style of the Holy Scrip- 
tures ; " and among many other little books, with God and 
Nature for their theme, was one, published in 1665, but written 
when he was very young, — "in my infancy," he says, writ-, 
ing to his sister, Lad}' Ranelagh, who had asked him to find 
it, — entitled, " Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects: 
whereto is premised a Discourse about such kind of Thoughts." 
This w r as the book afterwards ridiculed by Swift, in his " Medi- 
tations on a Broomstick." 

Robert Boyle's writings chiefly concerned experiments on air 
and on flame, till 1674, when he published " Observations and 
Experiments about the Saltness of the Sea," and a book written 
during his retirement from London in the plague-time of 1665, 
" The Excellenc} r of Theolog} T , compared with Natural Philoso- 
phy, as both are the Objects of Men's Study." In the follow- 
ing 3*ear, 1675, appeared his " Some Considerations about the 
Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion." Robert Boyle, who 
never named God without a reverent pause, refused to take 
orders with assurance of high church promotion ; he said that 
he could serve religion more effectually as a laj'man. He sent 
to a friend in the Levant, for distribution, Dr. Edward Pocock's 
translation into Arabic of Grotius on the "Truth of Christi- 
anit}'," printed at Boyle's expense, after a liberal reward to 
the translator. Boyle caused also an Irish Bible to be pro- 
duced, and this too was printed at his expense. As one of 
its directors, he was active in urging the East-India Company 
to use its influence in spreading Christianit}' with trade ; and 
he was the first governor of a corporation for the propagation 
of the Gospel and the conversion of the American natives 
in New England. For six years he helped to provide Burnet 
with the means that enabled him to write and publish the first 



466 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |A.D. 1650 

volume of his " History of the Reformation." In 1680 Robert 
Bo3 T le declined the Presidency of the Ro} T al Societ}', because 
he was unwilling to be bound hy tests and oaths on taking 
office. He was not a Nonconformist, but was zealous against 
intolerance. He also declined the Provostship of Eton, and 
several times refused a peerage. He is said to have spent a 
thousand pounds a year in works of benevolence. Robert 
Bo} r le was tall, very thin, and of feeble constitution. He never 
married. His dearest female friend was his sister, Lady 
Ranelagh, whom he survived only a week. He died at the 
end of December, 1691. 

6. A friend and fellow-laborer of Robert Boyle's was Robert 
Hooke, who was born in 1635; was educated at Oxford, where he as- 
sisted Wallis in his chemical experiments ; and, in 1662, was made Cura- 
tor of the Experiments of the Royal Society; in 1664, its Professor of 
Mechanics; and, in 1665, Professor of Geometry in Gresham College. 
He improved the microscope, was at the head of English microscopic 
research, and published, about 1666, his " Micrographia; or, some Physio- 
logical Descriptions of Minute Bodies, made by Magnifying Glasses." 
Hooke, who was made M.D. by Tillotson in 1691, and died in 1702, was 
one of the best representatives of the activity of scientific thought 
under Charles II. His published writings are numerous. 

7. John Ray was the chief botanist of the time. He was a black- 
smith's son, born in 1628 at Black Notley, near Braintree, Essex. He 
was sent from Braintree School to Cambridge, where he obtained a fel- 
lowship of Trinity; in 1651 was Greek Lecturer of his college, and after- 
wards Mathematical Reader. In 1660 he published a Latin Catalogue 
of Plants growing about Cambridge, and then made a botanical tour 
through Great Britain. His Latin " Catalogue of the Plants of Eng- 
land and the Adjacent Isles " first appeared in 1670. Ray took orders 
at the Restoration, but refused subscription, and resigned. In 1663 he 
went with a pupil, F. Willoughby, to the Continent, and published an 
account of his travels there in 1673, as '^Observations made in a Journey 
through Part of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France, with 
a Catalogue of Plants not Natives of England." Ray married, in 1673, 
a lady twenty-four years younger than himself; educated the children 
of his friend Mr. Willoughby, who had died in 1672; and finally, in 
1679, he settled in his native place, and lived there till his death, in 
1705. Among his books was " A Collection of English Proverbs, with 
Short Annotations," first published in 1670; and he produced, in 1691, 
"The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Creation;" in 1692, "Miscel- 
laneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the 
World;" in 1093, " Three Pbysi co-Theological Discourses concerning 



To A.D. 1700.] THOMAS SYDENHAM. 467 

Chaos, the Deluge, and the Dissolution of the World;" and in 1700, 
" A Persuasive to a Holy Life." Kay was one of Nature's naturalists 
— wise, modest, and unassuming — with the sense of God that comes 
of a full study and enjoyment of his works. 

8. There was much ridicule of the Royal Society in its first years, and 
a belief in many that its new ways of research were destructive of true 
learning, and even of religion. This caused Thomas Sprat to publish, 
in 1667, his "History of the Royal Society." Sprat, born in Devonshire 
in 1636, was a clergyman's son. He studied at Wadham College, Oxford, 
became M.A. in 1657, and obtained a fellowship. His turn for science 
meant no more than activity of mind under the influence of Dr. Wilkins, 
who was Warden of Wadham. His turn for verse seems to have meant 
no more than activity of mind under the influence of Cowley, who, since 
1657, had been, as Dr. Cowley, one of Wil kins' s circle of philosophers. 
Sprat's last poem was upon Cowley's death; one of his earliest poems 
was on the death of Cromwell, "To the Happy Memory of the late Lord 
Protector ; " and he published also, in 1659, a Cowleian poem, in thirty- 
one "Pindaric" stanzas, on "The Plague of Athens," suggested by 
the description of it in Thucydides. Sprat took orders at the Restora- 
tion, was chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, and soon afterwards 
to the king. Cowley, with whom he was intimate, died in 1667; and 
Sprat's enthusiastic ode on Cowley's poetry was written in the year 
of the publishing of his "History of the Royal Society." Cowley 
had intrusted to his friend Sprat the care of his writings, and in 1668 
Sprat published Cowley's Latin works, prefaced with a "Life of Cow- 
ley," also in Latin. This was amplified and prefixed, in 1688, to an 
edition of Cowley's English works. Thomas Sprat's life after the age 
of thirty-two does not concern literature. In 1688 he had been four 
years Bishop of Rochester. He complied as passively as he could with 
the Revolution, and died in 1713. 

9. In medicine the advance made by Thomas Sydenham 
from traditions in the treatment of disease to fresh observation 
and thought was so great that the modern art of healing was, 
in a sense, founded by him. Sydenham was born of a good 
Dorsetshire family in 1624, went to Oxford at eighteen, and at 
the age of twenty-four, in 1648, took the degree of M.B., and 
obtained a fellowship at All Souls. He visited the medical 
school at Montpellier, and then practised medicine at West- 
minster. In 1663 he was made Licentiate of the Royal College 
of Pbvysicians. His medical writings are not voluminous, but 
they are very practical. He observed nature minutely, and 
was a fellow- thinker with Robert Boyle, who had a most lively 
interest in the application of the study of nature to the practice 



468 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

of medicine. Among Boyle's suggestions was an anticipation 
of the observing of sounds within the body as a help to a 
knowledge of the nature of disease. Writing of a certain fever, 
Sydenham described his treatment, and said: "Meanwhile I 
watched what method Nature might take, with the intention of 
subduing the symptoms by treading in her footsteps. . . . More 
could be left to Nature than we are at present in the habit of 
leaving her. To imagine that she always wants the aid of Art~ 
is an error — an unlearned error, too." The plrysician must, 
he argued, follow and aid the processes b}^ which Nature relieves 
herself of a disease, or else he must discover a specific. The 
search for specifics, dwelt upon by Robert Boyle as one duty of 
the physician, seemed to S} T denham also of highest importance. 
One of the few known specifics, Peruvian bark, which has a 
supreme power over ague, 83'denham used with the best effect; 
and against much medical condemnation of it as quackery, he 
succeeded in effecting its general use in England for that 
disease. He was the first to introduce a great reform into 
the treatment of small-pox. His medical writings chiefly dealt 
with the epidemics that spread death in our towns, because 
in this direction he might help to do in his own art the highest 
service to society. He died in 1689. 

10. Sir Thomas Browne was born in 1605, and was 
educated at Winchester and Oxford. He practised plrysic for 
a time in Oxfordshire, married, went to Ireland, France, and 
Italy ; on his way home through Holland was made M.D. at 
Levden, returned to England, and in 1636 settled at Norwich. 
In 1642 he published his " Religio Medici" (the Religion of 
a Physician), rich in the original quaintness that was then 
especially enjoj-ed, full of learning, Latinism, acute perception, 
and courageous ingenuity, and with religious depths where now 
and then the formalist suspected shallows, with delight in 
knowledge, acceptance of the scientific errors of the time, and 
bold feeling in right and wrong directions for new matter of 
thought. In 1646 Dr. Browne published his " Pseudodoxia 
Epidemica ; or, Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors," 
which showed the scientific mind itself accepting uncorrected 
errors of the learned upon which, in our thoughtless moods, we 



To A.D. 1700.] SIR KENELM DIGBY. 469 

ma}' now look back with surprise. The men of science had 
only made a fresh start with more settled determination, and a 
better guide upon the road to truth. But Bacon knew no better 
than his neighbors what they would find on the way. Coper- 
nicus had reasoned in vain for him as for others. When Bacon 
rejected the theory of the cr3 T stalline spheres, he added, " Noth- 
ing is more false than all these fancies, except perhaps the 
motions of the earth, which are more false still." John Wilkins 
was one of the few men then in England for whom Galileo had 
not spoken in vain. " Smectymnuus," opposing one of Bishop 
Hall's assertions, took the notion " that the earth moves " as a 
commonplace for an absurdity: "We shall show anon that 
there is no more truth in this assertion than if he had said 
with Anaxagoras, ' Snow is black ; ' or with Copernicus, c The 
earth moves, and the heavens stand still.' " Error so great 
among the learned showed clearly enough that it was not for 
science to stand still. The discover}' of some ancient urns in 
Norfolk, led Dr. Browne to publish a work on the funeral rites 
of the olden times. This was entitled " Hydrotaphia," and 
with a work named " The Garden of Cyrus," devoted to horti- 
culture and the mystical properties of the number five, was 
published in 1658. In 1671 he was knighted ; and he died 
in 1682. 

11. Elias Ashmole (b. 1617, d. 1692), who under the Commonwealth 
studied alchemy, published, in 1652, a " Theatrum Chemicum Britan- 
nicum, containing several Poetical Pieces of our famous Philosophers 
who have written the Hermetique Mysteries in their own Ancient 
Language;" in 1654, a "Fasciculus Chemicus;" and, in 1658, "The 
Way to Bliss," which expressed faith in the Philosopher's Stone. Ash- 
mole published in 1672 a "History of the Garter." 

12. Ashmole' s taste for the marvellous in nature was shared by Sir 
Kenelm Digby. An Everard Digby, who died in 1592, wrote curious 
books; his son, Sir Everard, knighted by James I., was hanged, drawn, 
and quartered for giving fifteen hundred pounds towards expenses of 
the Gunpowder Plot. The eldest son of that Sir Everard was Sir Kenelm 
Digby, born in 1603, and educated at Oxford. He travelled in Spain,! 
discovered, as he supposed, a sympathetic powder for cure of wounds, 
was knighted in 1623, was sent with a fleet into the Mediterranean in 
1628, and returned to the faith of his fathers as a Roman Catholic in 
1636. In the civil wars he helped the king among the Roman Catholics, 



470 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

and was then exile in France until Cromwell's supremacy gave him 
liberty to revisit England; but he returned to France. He published, 
in 1644, a mystical interpretation of " The 22d Stanza in the 9th Canto 
of the 2d Book of Spenser's Faery Queen;" in 1645, "Two Treatises 
on the Nature of Bodies and of Man's Soul;" took lively interest in 
Palingenesis; wrote "Observations upon Sir T. Browne's Religio Med- 
ici," and was ingenious in the pursuit of forms of learning which have 
proved to be more curious than true. He died in 1665. 

13. The greatest name among English men of science since 
Bacon made its appearance in this period. Isaac Newton 
was born at the manor of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Christ- 
mas Da}*, 1642. His father's death left the manor to him in 
his childhood, and a few } r ears afterwards his mother married 
again. He went to the free school at Grantham, and was then 
taken home to learn the management of his small property ; but 
his bent for stud}' caused him to be sent back to Grantham 
School ; and he entered, at eighteen, Trinity College, Cambridge, 
where he took his degree as B.A. in 1G65. There his interest 
in mathematics was quickened by Isaac Barrow, who became, 
in 1663, the first Lucasian lecturer in mathematics. From 
Euclid, understood at the first reading, Newton turned to Des- 
cartes, whose new methods were then being followed at Cam- 
bridge, and from Descartes passed to the mathematical writings 
of John Wallis ; and these, especially his " Arithmetica Infini- 
torum," were the books that stimulated Newton's own genius,, 
and led him to his theory of fluxions (differential and inte- 
gral calculus), written in 1665, at the age of twentj*- three. 
Leibnitz afterwards contested with him honors of discovery. 
This was an addition to mathematical science which gave the 
most essential aid to exact calculation of the movements of the 
heavenly bodies. Newton occupied himself also, at this time, 
with the grinding of object-glasses. Observations with a prism 
led Newton to views upon the decomposition of light, which 
were developed into a new revelation of the processes of 
nature. In 1668 he became M.A. and Fellow of his College. 
In 1669 he succeeded his friend Barrow as mathematical pro- 
fessor ; and the course of his researches at that time caused 
him to give lectures on optics, in Latin. In 1672 Isaac New- 
ton became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and communicated 



To A.D. 1700.] POLITICAL ECONOMISTS. 471 

to it his new theor}- of Light. His first discovery of the law 
of gravitation was made also in the reign of Charles II., 
although not published until later. Newton's marvellous in- 
sight into the order of Nature increased his reverence for the 
Creator. He spent much time in study of the Bible ; and when 
he became foremost in fame among philosophers, and there was 
wonder at the comprehensive character of his discoveries, he 
said only : " To myself I seem to have been as a child picking 
up stones on the sea-shore, while the great ocean of truth lay 
unexplored before me." It was in that year of troubles, 1687, 
that Isaac Newton published the great work which includes his 
demonstration of the theory of gravitation, commonly known 
as Newton's " Principia." In 1688 he was made M.P. for the 
University of Cambridge ; and again in 1701. In 1695 he was 
made warden of the Mint, and, in 1699, its master, and in this 
capacity he continued until his death, which occurred in 1727. 
He was knighted in 1705. He left numerous unpublished writ- 
ings, of which two have since been printed: ''Observations 
upon the Prophecies," and " The Chronology of Ancient King- 
doms." 

14. The busy spirit of inquiry that had advanced from reform of 
church discipline to active study of the foundations of religion and 
government, that sought more and more to interpret and apply to the 
use of man the laws of external nature, was at the same time occupied 
with a scrutiny of those natural laws which affect the results of human 
intercourse and the social well-being of nations. Attempts were made in 
the direction of a science of Political Economy. In 1664, with some curi- 
ous documents upon English trade with the East Indies, appeared " Eng- 
land's Treasure by Foreign Trade," by Thomas Mun, the ablest advo- 
cate of the East India Company. He was then dead, and may have 
written the book five and twenty years before. In this work Mun up- 
held foreign commerce as the best source of a nation's wealth; and held 
by an old theory of the balance of trade, that our exports should exceed 
our imports, so that the difference between them — the balance of trade 
— should always be coming in as bullion or money. Another of the 
reasoners on commerce in the reign of Charles II. was Sir Josiah Child 
(b. 1630, d. 1699), who published, in 1668, a treatise which in a second 
and an enlarged edition was entitled a "Xew Discourse of Trade." It 
argued incidentally against the dread of depopulation by colonies, and 
other errors ; but its main object was to advocate reduction of the legal 
rate of interest. Sir William Petty published, in 1662, "A Treatise of 



472 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

Taxes and Contributions," and in it lie was, incidentally, the first to lay 
down the doctrine that the value of commodities is determined by the 
labor and time needed for producing them. Petty died in 1687. 

15. In July, 1683, upon false accusation of complicity in the 
Rye House Plot, Lord William Russell was executed in Lin- 
coln's Inn Fields, and. on the 7th of December. Algernon 
Sidney, upon Tower Hill. Algernon Sidney, second son of 
Robert, second Earl of Leicester, and brother to "Waller's 
" Sacharissa," had shown throughout his career lively hostility 
to tyranny. He had been out of England in the earlier years 
of Charles II. 's reign, but in 1077 came home, at his father's 
death, and was detained by a chancery suit. He was an Inde- 
pendent and a Republican. For that he died, convicted of trea- 
son, says Evelyn. " on the single witness of that monster of a 
man, Lord Howard of Escrick, and some sheets of paper taken 
in Mr. Sidney's study, pretended to be written by him. but not 
fully proved." Lie left behind him "Discourses Concerning 
Government." first published in 1698. 

16. Izaak Walton, born in 1593 at Stafford, was a hosier 
in the Royal Exchange, and afterwards in Fleet Street, near 
Chancery Lane, making money enough to retire upon and take 
life easily. In 1626 he married a descendant of Cranmer. He 
was left a widower in 1640. In 1647 he married a half-sister of 
Bishop Ken. He was a hearty Royalist and churchman, who 
loved God and nature with simplicity of mind, and greatly 
relished a day's fishing. In 1053 he gave to his countrymen 
the first edition of " The Compleat Angler : or. the Contempla- 
tive Man's Recreation : being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing," 
in form of dialogue, with pictures of the trout, pike, carp. 
tench, perch, and barbel. In 1655 a second edition appeared. 
largely rewritten, much enlarged, with three speakers. Piscator. 
Venator (taking the place of Viator), and Auceps, — Fisher, 
Hunter, and Birdcatcher, — and with four more pictures of fish. 
In 1670, he published in one volume the "Lives" — written 
from time to time — of Hooker, Wotton. Donne, and Herbert; 
to which collection, after Walton's death, his life of Sanderson 
was added. In 1676 Charles Cotton (b. 1630. d. 1687), a 
translator of Corneille's tk Horace " and Montaio-ue's "Essays," 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN LOCKE. 473 

and author of a " Travestie of Virgil," added the "Second 
Part of the Complete Angler : being Instructions how to Angle 
for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream." Walton died in 
December, 1683, aged ninety. 

17. Ralph Cudworth, born in 1617, at Aller, Somerset- 
shire, became Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 
1644 he was Master of Clare Hall ; in 1645, Regius Professor of 
Hebrew, and devoted himself to Jewish antiquities. He became 
D.D. in 1651 ; in 1654, Master of Christ's College. He then 
married, and spent the rest of his life at Cambridge. In 1678 
he published the first part of " The True Intellectual S}'stem of 
the Universe." The work was planned in three parts, of which 
this first part was devoted to the refutation of atheism. The 
other two parts were to have been on Moral Distinctions and 
Free Will. His philosophical method and liberality of mind 
offended man}' theologians, who cried out on him as an atheist 
for his method of refuting atheism. He died in the }-ear of the 
Revolution, leaving one daughter, who married Sir Francis 
Masham. 

18. John Locke was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, on 
the 29th of August, 1632. His father served in the Parliament- 
ary Wars under Colonel Popham, by whose advice Locke was 
sent to Westminster School. In 1651, he was elected student 
of Christchurch, Oxford, where he turned from the Aristotelian 
scholastic philosoplry, read Bacon, and read also Descartes, 
through whom, by study of an opposing doctrine, he became 
more strongly animated with the spirit of Bacon's teaching. 
The new and growing interest in scientific studies caused Locke 
to find charm in experimental science. Having taken his degree 
in arts, he chose physic as his profession. But Locke's health 
was delicate ; and in 1665 he went abroad as secretary to Sir 
Walter Vane, then sent as envoy to some German princes. 
After three months' absence, he returned to Oxford, and was 
there when Lord Ashley was sent from London to drink the 
mineral waters of Astrop. Lord Ashley wrote to ask Dr. 
Thomas, a physician at Oxford, to have the waters ready 
against his coming there. Dr. Thomas, being called awa} r , 
asked his friend, Mr. Locke, to procure them. He employed 



474 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

somebcxty who disappointed him, and had to call upon Lord 
Ashley to make apologies. Lord Ashley kept him to supper, 
asked him to dinner next day, became fascinated by his liberal 
and thoughtful conversation, and, in 1667, asked him to stay 
at his house in London. Ashley urged upon Locke not to pur- 
sue medicine as a profession, beyond using his skill among his 
friends, but to devote the powers of his mind to study of the 
great questions in politics. Locke did so, and was often con- 
sulted hy a patron who was but an erratic follower of principles 
which Locke developed and maintained throughout his life with 
calm consistency. As one of those included in the grant of 
Carolina, Lord Ashley employed Locke to draw up a constitu- 
tion for the new colony; he did so, and showed in it a strong 
regard for civil and religious liberty. In 1668 Locke became 
one of the Fellows of the Royal Society. About the same time, 
at a lively discussion with some literary friends in his room in 
London, it seemed to him that the differences of opinion lay 
wholly in words. This thought first turned his mind in the 
direction of his " Essay concerning Human Understanding." 

In 1672, Ashley became Earl of Shaftesbuiy and Lord Chan- 
cellor, and made Locke secretary of presentations under him. 
In June, 1673, he made him also secretaiy to the Council of 
Trade, over which Shaftesbuiy was president. Locke held the 
office in chancery only while his friend was chancellor. The 
secretaiy ship, which was worth five hundred pounds a year, 
he retained till the commission expired, in March, 1675. Af- 
terwards, he went to Montpellier, where there was a great 
medical school, and also a southern climate, which his health 
required, for he was threatened with consumption. He was at 
work upon his " Essay " at Montpellier, but when, in 1679, his 
patron Shaftesbuiy became president of Sir William Temple's 
newly-de vised Council, he sent for Locke, who returned to 
England, and was by his friend's side in the ensuing time of 
peril. After his escape from the scaffold in 1682, Shaftesbury 
went to Holland, and died there in 1683. Locke afterwards fled 
to Holland. James II. demanded him of the States, on false sus- 
picion of his having been concerned in Monmouth's invasion, 
and he was in concealment till the close of 1686. In 1687 he 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN LOCKE. 475 

was in safe harbor at Amsterdam, where his chief friends were 
the leaders of the Arminian or Remonstrant school, which had 
its headquarters there. These friends were Philip van Lim- 
borch and Jean Le Clerc. Locke's " Essay Concerning Human 
Understanding" was finished among these friends at Amster- 
dam in 1687 ; and an outline of it, translated into French b}- 
Le Clerc. appeared in the " Bibliotheque Universelle " for Jan- 
uary. 1688. Other extracts from it afterwards appeared in the 
same journal. Locke's "New Method of a Common-place 
Book" was translated into English in 1697, from Le Clerc's 
44 Bibliotheque " for July, 1686. 

The English Revolution having been accomplished, John 
Locke came over to England in February, 1689, in the fleet 
that convoyed the Princess of Orange. He was made a Com- 
missioner of Appeals, with a salaiy of two hundred pounds a 
year ; and declined other preferment, including offer of the post 
of envoy to some court where the air might suit his inferior 
health. But he found a pleasant home at Oates, in Essex, with 
Sir Francis and Lady Masham. Lady Masham was Cud worth's 
only child, and had been trained 03- her father to scholarship 
and liberal thought ; she and her husband were, therefore, in 
strong intellectual sympathy with Locke, and established a 
room as his own in their country house at Oates. In 1091, 
Locke published " Some Considerations of the Consequences of 
the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money." 
The practical tendency of his writings caused him to be made, 
in 1695, a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations ; and he sur- 
prised merchants by showing them how a philosopher might have 
wider and clearer views of business than they had themselves. 
In 1700 he resigned his seat at the Board of Trade, and spent 
the rest of his life at Oates, in stud}' of the Scriptures. He 
died there, on the 28th of October, 1704, aged seventy-two. In 
Locke's personal character there was the simplicit}" of genius. 
Living a pure life, with its whole labor given to the highest 
interests of men. Locke was naturally grave, but his was the 
gravity of unaffected thoughtfulness, which qualified him but 
the more for innocent enjoyment. He spoke and wrote plain 
English, gave himself no airs of artificial dignity, would laugh 



47G MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

at those who labored to look wise, and quote the maxim of 
Rochefoucauld, that gravity is a mysteiy of the body contrived 
to conceal faults of the mind. 

Locke's most important writings came together with the new 
order of things in England, and expressed the spirit of the 
English Revolution. He dealt first with religious liberty, in 
" Three Letters concerning Toleration." The first was in 
Latin, addressed to Limborch, and printed at Gouda in 1689, 
translated in the same year into Dutch and French, and then 
into English by William Popple. Its argument is that tolera- 
tion is the chief characteristic mark of the true Church. An- 
tiquity, orthodoxy, and reformed discipline may be marks dwelt 
upon b} T men striving for power over one another ; but charity, 
meekness, and good will to men are marks of the true Christian. 
Christianity is no matter of pomp and dominion ; its power is 
over men's lives, to war against their lusts and vices, teach 
them charity, and inspire them with a faith working by love. 
If persecution be a zeal for men's souls, why does it leave lusts 
of the flesh unattacked, and onl}' compel men to profess what 
they do not believe in points of doctrine? It is the duty, 
Locke argued, of the civil magistrate to secure to eveiw citizen 
the just possession of the things belonging to this life — his 
life itself, his liberty, health, and safe possession of his goods. 
It is not the duty of the civil magistrate to dictate religion to 
the people. God never gave such authority, and man cannot 
delegate to another the command over his soul. The power 
of the magistrate consists only in outward force, which cannot 
produce inward persuasion. He may argue, indeed, and so 
ma} T other men ; but in this he alone is master who convinces. 
Nor if men's minds were changed would the}' be probably 
nearer heaven for adopting the opinions of the court. The 
church onl} T is concerned with souls of men, and a church 
Locke held to be "a voluntary societj- of men joining them- 
selves together of their own accord, in order to the public 
worshipping of God in such a manner as the} T judge acceptable 
to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls." In his 
first letter, Locke set forth in full his principles upon toleration, 
and met by anticipation some of the chief objections likely to be 



ToA.D. 1700.] JOHN LOCKE. 477 

urged against them. Locke's second letter, published in 1690, 
and third, a work of some length, in 1692, both signed " Phi- 
lanthropus," were replies to the objections actually raised by 
theologians of Queen's College, Oxford, in three letters, of 
which the first was entitled, " The Argument of the Letter con- 
cerning Toleration briefly Considered and Answered." 

Locke's argument for religious libeily, in 1689, was followed 
by his argument also for civil liberty. In 1689 and 1690 he 
published " Two Treatises of Government ; " one opposed to 
the arguments of Sir Robert Firmer in his " Patriarcha," which 
had appeared in 1680, and was applauded by upholders of the 
absolute supremacy of kings ; the other " An Essay concerning 
the true Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government." 

They were described by him as the beginning and end of a discourse 
concerning government, and he hoped " sufficient to establish the throne 
of our great restorer, our present King William ; to make good his title, 
in the consent of the people, which being the only one of all lawful gov- 
ernments, he has more fully and clearly than any prince in Christendom; 
and to justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their 
just and natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, saved 
the nation when it was on the very brink of slavery and ruin." He 
should not, he said, have replied to Sir Robert " were there not men 
amongst us, who, by crying up his books and espousing his doctrine, save 
me from the reproach of writing against a dead adversary." Sir Robert 
based his plea for absolute monarchy upon the argument that men are 
not naturally free. They are born in subjection to their parents, and 
imperial authority is based on patriarchal. Absolute lordship was vested 
in Adam, inherited from him by the patriarchs. A son, a subject, and a 
servant or slave, were one and the same thing at first. This argument 
was combated by Locke in his first Treatise ; and in the second he set 
forth what he believed to be the real basis of civil government. " Po- 
litical power," he said, " I take to be a right of making laws with penal- 
ties of death, and, consequently, all less penalties, for the regulating and 
preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in 
the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth 
from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good." Men, he 
said, are by nature subject only to the laws of nature, born equal and 
free. But the state of liberty is not a state of license. Reason is one 
of the laws of nature, and it teaches that, if men are all equal and inde- 
pendent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or 
possessions. Next to the preservation of himself, the natural law wills 
that each shall aid in the preservation of the rest of mankind ; and into 



478 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

every man's hand is put the execution of such natural law on those who 
molest their neighbors, as far as reason allows that power may be used 
to prevent recurrence of offence, or secure reparation for the injury. In 
this state of nature, Locke argued, all men are, until by their own con- 
sent they make themselves members of some political society. Pater- 
nal power is the right and duty of guiding children till they reach ma- 
turity, because they are not, as soon as born, under the law of reason, 
and this has no analogy with the social compact. A civil society is 
formed when any number of men agree to form a government that shall 
maintain and execute laws for avoidance of those evils which lie in 
the state of nature, where every man is judge in his own case. Abso- 
lute monarchy, said Locke, is no form of civil government at all; for 
the end of civil society is to avoid the inconveniences of a state of na- 
ture, and that is not done by setting up a man who shall be always judge 
in his own case, and therefore himself in the state of nature in respect 
of those under his dominion. In this work, Locke gave philosophical 
expression to the principles established practically by the English Eevo- 
lution. 



Locke's " Essay concerning Human Understanding," in Four 
Books, was first published complete in 1690. Its object was to 
lead men out of the way of vain contention by showing, through 
an inquiry into the nature of the human understanding, what are 
the bounds beyond which argument is vain. In his First Book 
he followed into a new field Bacon's principles, and maintained 
that man has no innate ideas, but is created with a receptive 
mind and reason, whereby he draws knowledge from the universe 
without. In his Second Book, Locke traced the origin of our 
ideas from the world about us by sensation or reflection, and 
argued that our most complex thoughts are formed by various 
combinations of simple ideas derived from the world about us, 
suggested to the mind only by sensation and reflection, and the 
sole materials of all our knowledge. The Third Book was a dis- 
tinct essay upon words as signs of ideas, and enforced the im- 
portance of assuring that, as far as possible, the}' shall be made 
to represent clearly the same impressions in the minds of those 
who use them, and of those to whom they are addressed. Thus 
two men might argue without end upon the question whether a 
bat be a bird, if the}' had no clear and equal notion of the col- 
lection of simple ideas forming the complex idea of a bat, where- 
by they could ascertain whether it contained all the simple ideas 



To A.D. 1700.] JOIW LOCKE. 479 

to which, combined together, the} T both give the name of bird. 
The Fourth Book of the Essay applied the whole argument to 
a consideration of the bounds of knowledge and opinion. 
Knowledge can extend no farther than we have ideas, and is 
the perception of the connection and agreement or disagree- 
ment and repugnancy of any of our ideas. What is deducible 
from human experience God enabled us b}~ reason to discover. 
What lies be}*ond our experience ma} T be the subject of a reve- 
lation, which is above reason, but not against it. Locke ended 
with a threefold division of the objects of human knowledge 
— 1, Stud}' of nature, in the largest sense a man's contempla- 
tion of things themselves for the discovery of truth ; 2, Prac- 
tical applications, a man's contemplation of the things in his 
own power for the attainment of his ends; and, 3, Man's con- 
templation of the signs (chiefly words) that the mind makes use 
of, both in the one and the other, and the right ordering of them 
for its clearer information. " All which three," said Locke, 
k, viz., things, as they are in themselves knowable ; actions, 
as they depend on us in order to happiness ; and the right use 
of signs in order to knowledge, being ' toto ccelo ' different, they 
seemed to me to be the three great provinces of the intellectual 
world, wholly separate and distinct one from another." In this 
Essay, and in his two letters to Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worces- 
ter, in the course of the controversy raised over it, the simple 
piet}' of Locke is very manifest. The reason of Locke caused 
him to maintain tk that we more certainly know that there is a 
God than that there is any thing else without us." 

Locke had finished, in March, 1690, " Some Thoughts con- 
cerning Education," published in 1693, — a treatise wisely de- 
signed to bring experience and reason to aid in right training 
of the bodies and minds of children. It is very practical, 
beginning with the education that may form a healthy body, 
passing then to a consideration of the right methods of in- 
fluencing and guiding the mind, the relation of parents to the 
children, who ' k must not be hindered from being children, or 
from playing, or doing as children, but from doing ill ; " rela- 
tion of teachers to the young, development of character, subjects 
and methods of formal study, and the ordering of travel. The 



430 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650. 

influence of Locke's treatise on education was direct and whole- 
some ; and to this da}', among sensible customs and traditional 
opinions that help to the well-being of an English or an Ameri- 
can home, there are generally some that ma}' be traced back to 
the time when Locke's treatise on education was a new book 
with a living power over many of its readers. 

In 1695 Locke published a book on " The Reasonableness 
of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures," the result of 
his endeavor to turn aside from contending s} T stems of theology 
and betake himself to the sole reading of the Scripture for the 
understanding of the Christian religion. Out of the same spirit 
came his study of St. Paul in " A Paraphrase and Notes on the 
Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, 
Ephesians. To which is prefixed, An Essa}^ for the Under- 
standing of St. Paul's Epistles, by consulting St. Paul him- 
self." This was published in 1705, the year after his death. 
In 1706 appeared some posthumous works of his, the chief 
being an essay "Of the Conduct of the Understanding," the 
self-education of the man in learning to make right use of his 
mind, which has its natural place between the "Essay con- 
cerning Human Understanding " and the " Thoughts concerning 
Education." 



CHAPTER X. 

SECOND HALF OP THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 

HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS, DIARISTS, AND 

ESSAYISTS. 

I. Lord Clarendon. — 2. Samuel Pepys. — 3. John Aubrey. — 4. Anthony a Wood. — 

5. Gilbert Burnet. — 6. Roger North. — 7. John Strype. — 8. Humphrey Pri- 
deaux. — 9. John Evelyn. — 10. Sir William Temple. — 11. Marcbamont Need- 
ham; Roger L'Estrange. — 12. Jeremy Collier. — 13. Gerard Laugbaine. 

1. Edward Hyde was made at the coronation of Charles 

II. Earl of Clarendon, having been Lord Chancellor since 
1658. After his fall, in 1667, he went to France, and died at 
Rouen, in December, 1674. His " Brief View of the Pernicious 
Errors in Hobbes's Leviathan" appeared two } T ears after his 
death ; but his ' ' Histoiy of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in 
England, begun in the Year 1641," was first published at 
Oxford, in three folios, in 1702-4. Still later, in 1727, ap- 
peared in folio "A Collection of several Tracts of the Right 
Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon," containing his " Vin- 
dication " from the charge of high treason that closed his 
political career; "Reflections upon several Christian Duties, 
Divine and Moral, by way of Essays," all written after his 
fall; a "Dialogue on Education," and a complete set of 
"Contemplations and Reflections on the Psalms of David." 
The manuscripts of Clarendon's own "Account of his Life, 
from his Birth to the Restoration in 1660," and a Continua- 
tion from 1660 to 1667, written for the information of his 
children, were given by Clarendon's descendants to the uni- 
versity of which he had been chancellor, and were first published 
at Oxford in 1759. The "Continuation" serves at the same 
time as a continuation of the History of the Rebellion, Claren- 
don's life being as inseparable from the events in which he 
played a leading part as his histoiy is inseparable from the bias 
of mind which determined his career. 481 



482 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

2. Man}' details of life in the reign of Charles II. are brought 
near to us by the diary of Samuel Pepys (b. 1632, d. 1703), 
the son of a tailor. He went to St. Paul's School and Cam- 
bridge, married at twenty-three a girl of fifteen, and was helped 
up in life by the patronage of Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards 
Earl of Sandwich, to whom he was related. He became, as 
Clerk of the Acts, a busy and useful member of the Navy 
Board, not unmindful of profits to be made in his position, but 
watchful over the best interests of the navy. This was his 
position during the 3-ears in which he kept his amusing " Diary." 
It extends from January, 1660, to May, 1669. The un- 
guarded small-talk of the diary, a mixture of simplicity and 
shrewdness, which entertains us while it gives life to our 
knowledge of the past, should not make us forget that Pepys 
was a sensible and active public servant. The liveliest' im- 
pression of the fire of London is that given us in his u Diarj^," 
from Sunday, the 2d of September, 1666, when a maid called 
Mr. and Mrs. Pepys up at three in the morning "to tell us 
of a great fire they saw in the city ; so I rose and slipped on 
my night-gown, and went to her window, and thought it to be 
on the back side of Mark-Lane at farthest," through all the 
work, misery, and confusion of the week, to the next Sunday, 
the 9th, when at church they had " a bad, poor sermon, though 
proper for the time ; nor eloquent, in saying at this time that 
the city is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio." 
Pep} T s's "Diary," in six manuscript volumes, was among the 
books and papers bequeathed by him to Magdalene College. 
It was first published by Lord Braybrooke, in 1825. 

3. John Aubrey (b. 1626, d. 1697), who, in 1646, by his father's death, 
inherited estates in Wiltshire, Surrey, Herefordshire, Brecknockshire, 
and Monmouthshire, had a taste for antiquarian gossip, hut was so 
credulous and superstitious that his records are worth little. His 
"Miscellanies upon Various Subjects," first published in 1696, are an 
amusing gathering of superstitious notes upon Day-Fatality, Appari- 
tions, etc. Aubrey left behind him a work on "The Natural History 
and Antiquities of the County of Surrey." He lost his property, by 
litigation and otherwise. Anthony a Wood, after twenty-five years' 
acquaintance, said of him, spitefully: "He was a shiftless person, 
roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than erased; and, 



To A.D. 1700.] GILBERT BURNET. 483 

being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many letters sent to A. W. 
with folliries and misinformations." 

4. Anthony a Wood was born in 1632, at Oxford, oppo- 
site Merton College, where he afterwards was educated. He 
was admitted B.A. in 1652, M.A. in 1655, and then began a 
perambulation of Oxfordshire. He was inspired b}' Leland's 
collections in the Bodleian. His chief pleasures thenceforth 
were music and the study of Oxford antiquities. As he saj-s 
in his own account of his life: "All the time that A. W. 
could spare from his beloved studies of English history, antiqui- 
ties, heraldry, and genealogies, he spent in the most delight- 
ful facultie of music, either instrumental or vocal." In 1669 
he had written, in English, his "History and Antiquities of 
the University of Oxford," which was translated into Latin 
under the superintendence of Dr. Fell, who altered and added 
at discretion. As Anthon}' a Wood had not a sweet temper, 
and was accustomed to speak his mind roughly, he did not take 
this very kindly. The book appeared, in Latin, in 1674. His 
chief work, " Athenae Oxonienses ; an Exact History of all 
the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the 
University of Oxford : to which are added the Fasti, or An- 
nals of the said University," was first published, in two folios, 
in 1691-2. After the second volume appeared he was cited 
before the Vice-Chancellor's Court for two libellous accusations 
of corruption against the late Chancellor, the Earl of Claren- 
don. The book was burned, its author expelled, and gazetted 
as an infamous libeller, a year before his death in 1695. 

5. Gilbert Burnet, born in 1643, studied at Aberdeen. In 
1669 he was Divinity Professor at Glasgow. In 1674 he settled 
in London, and became preacher at the Rolls Chapel. In 1677 
Burnet published Li Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James 
and William, Dukes of Hamilton, etc., in Seven Books," upon 
which he had been at work in Scotland ; and in 1679 appeared 
the first of the three volumes of his u Histoiy of the Reforma- 
tion of the Church of England," which agreed so well with the 
feeling of the time against Catholicism that he received for it 
the thanks of both Houses of Parliament, with a desire that he 
would go on and complete the work. The second volume fol- 



484 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

lowed in 1681 ; the third not until 1715. Burnet was regarded 
\>y the Stuarts as an enenry, because he showed his sympathy 
with Lord William Russell during his trial and before his 
execution. Burnet was abroad, and much with the Prince and 
Princess of Orange, during the reign of James II. He came 
over with William as his chaplain. In 1690 he was made 
Bishop of Salisbuiy. He had published, in 1686, at Amsterdam, 
" Some Letters containing an Account of what seemed Most 
Remarkable in Switzerland, Italy," etc. The}- are five letters 
addressed to the Hon. Robert Boyle. The information in them 
is compactly given, and their tone is very strongly Protestant. 
Burnet published, in 1692, "A Life of William Bedell, D.D., 
Lord Bishop of Kilmore, in Ireland, with his Letters," and " A 
Discourse of the Pastoral Care." He died in 1715, leaving in 
manuscript the "History of His Own Time," which was first 
published in 1724-34. 

6. Roger North, sixth son of Dudley,. Lord North, was born about 
1650, and died in 1733. He was a strong partisan of the Stuarts, and was 
attorney-general under James II. He is chiefly remembered for two 
books that abound in anecdote of his own time. One of these is an 
abusive review of Dr. White Kennett's " History of England," and is 
entitled "Examen, or an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pre- 
tended Compleat History of England." This was not published till 
1710. His other notable book is "Lives" of his three brothers, the 
Lord-Keeper Guildford, Sir Dudley North, and Dr. John North. This 
was not published till 1712-41. 

7. John Strype, born at Stepney in 1613, was educated at St. Paul's 
School and Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1669 he was presented to the 
living of Theydon Boys, which he resigned for that of Low Leyton, in 
Essex. He lived to the age of ninety-four, and was incumbent of Low 
Leyton for sixty years. He was an accurate student of church history 
and biography, and began, in 1691. with a folio of "Memorials of Arch- 
bishop Cranmer." In 1698 appeared his "Life of Sir Thomas Smith," 
and in 1701 his " Life and Actions of John Ayhner, Bishop of London." 
Many other works of a similar kind followed. 

8. Humphrey Prideaux was born in 1618, at Padstow, in Cornwall; 
was educated chiefly at Westminster School and Christchurch, Oxford. 
In 1676 he wrote an account of the Arundel Marbles. Then he obtained 
the living of St. Clement's, Oxford, and in 1681 a prebend at Norwich. 
In 1697 he published a " Life of Mahomet," and in 1702 was made Dean 
of Norwich. His principal work is " The Old and New Testament Con- 
nected." 



To A. D. 1700.] SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 485 

9. John Evelyn was born in 1620, and educated at Oxford. 
He was active in promoting the restoration of Charles II., and 
was one of the first members of the Royal Society. He held 
mam* responsible positions under Charles II., James II., and 
William III. His famous garden at Sayes Court was described 
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societ}*. Among 
his numerous writings were "The French Gardener : Instruct- 
ing how to Cultivate all Sorts of Fruit-Trees and Herbs for the 
Garden" (1658) ; " Fumifngium ; or, the Aer and Smoak of 
London Dissipated" (1661); " Sculptura ; or, the History 
and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper" (1662) ; 
" Kalendarium Hortense ; or, the Gardener's Almanac " (1664) ; 
"Sylva" (1664), a Treatise on Forest-Trees, the first book 
printed for the Royal Societ}*, and the book with which his 
name is most associated; -'Terra" (1675), also printed for 
the Royal Societ}' ; " Navigation and Commerce : their Original 
and Progress" (1674), this being an introduction to a pro- 
jected History of the Dutch War; "Public Employment and 
an Active Life preferred to Solitude" (1667), an answer to one 
of Sir George Mackenzie's books, which was a " Moral Essay 
preferring Solitude to Public Employment." Under William 
III., Evelyn produced, in 1690, a satire on the frippery of 
ladies, " Mundus Muliebris ; or, the Ladies' Dressing Room 
Unlocked, and her Toilet Spread. In Burlesque. Together 
with the Fop-Dictionaiy, Compiled for the Use of the Fair 
Sex." In 1697, Evelyn published " Numismata : a Discourse 
of Medals ; " with a digression concerning Physiognonry ; and 
in 1699, " Acetaria : a Discourse of Sallets." His fame now 
principally rests on his " Diaiy," which he began in early life, 
and continued to near his death, in 1706. It was first pub- 
lished in 1818, edited by William Bray. 

10. Sir William Temple, born in 1628, the son of Sir 
John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, studied under 
Cud worth, at Cambridge, in the days of the Civil War. After 
two years at Emmanuel College, he left without a degree, trav- 
elled, became master of French and Spanish, married, and 
towards the close of the Commonwealth lived with his father in 
Ireland. In 1663 he came to London with his wife, and at- 



486 MANUAL VF ZXGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

tached himself to the rising fortunes of Lord Arlington, who 
sent him during the Dutch war as an English agent, with prom- 
ise of subsidy, to our ally the Bishop of Minister. He was 
appointed Resident at the viceregal court of Brussels. 
There he developed his skill in diplomacy. He was ma 
baronet in 1666. In 1671, when the secret treaty between 
France and England was ratified, Temple was dismissed, and 
retired to his estate at Sheen, and either there or at Moor Park. 
excepting for occasional employments in public duty, he passed 
the remainder of his life, and was visited and consulted as an 
oracle of political wisdom, by Charles II.. James II.. and 
"William III. He died in 1699. He wrote an "Essay on 
Government:"' "Observations upon the United Provinces of 
the Netherlands ;" *« Memoirs " of public transactions in which 
he had been engaged: Essays on ••Gardening.*' on •• Health 
and Long Life," on ■* Heroic Virtue." on ••Poetry." and on 
••Ancient and Modern Learning." The last involved him in 
the great dispute, which originated in France, and last* 
several years, over the comparative merits of the ancients 
and modems as writers. 

11. After private letters and occasional printed pamphlets of news. 
Mercuries of the Civil War had been the first active beginnings of the 
newspaper. Marchamont Nee&ham had attacked Charles I. in the 
"Mercurius Britannicus," was imprisoned, pardoned, and set up a 
1 •' Mercurkis Pragmaticus " against the king's enemies. By the kings 
enemies Needham was imprisoned, pardoned, and then wrote for about 
ten years "Mercurius Politicus " against the Royalists. Charles II. par- 
doned him. and he died in 167S. Sir Roger L'Estrange. youngest son 
of Sir Hammond L'Estrange. born in Xorfolk in 1616. and educat 
Cambridge, had been a friend of Charles I., and narrowly escaped exe- 
cution in the Civil Wars. In 1663 he published a pamphlet entitled, 
" Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press< 
together with Diverse Instances of Treasonous and Seditious Pamphlets, 
proving the Necessity thereof." This got him the post of Incens 
succession to Sir John Birkenhead, and also ''all the sole privilege : 
printing and publishing all narratives, advertisements. Mercuries, intel- 
ligencers, diurnals, and other books of public intelligence."' He began 
business at the end of August, 1663, with " The Public Intellige: 
and introduced it with this doctrine: ''As to the point of printed intel- 
ligence. I do declare myself (as I hope I may in a matter le: - - - 
lutely indifferent, whether any or none) that supposing the press in 



To A.D. 1700.] JEREMY COLLIER. 487 

order, the people in their right wits, and news or no news to be the 
question, a public Mercury should never have my vote ; because I think 
it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of 
their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious, and gives them not only 
an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with 
the government." Still he would do what he might to " redeem the 
vulgar from their former mistakes and illusions." As for reports of 
debates in Parliament, "I have observed," says L'Estrange, "very ill 
effects many times from the ordinary written papers of Parliament 
news " — such as Andrew Marvell supplied regularly to his constituents 
— " by making the coffee-houses and all the popular clubs judges of those 
councils and deliberations which they have nothing to do withall." In 
November, 1665, when the plague in London had driven the Court to 
Oxford, appeared No. 1 of " The Oxford Gazette." When the Court 
returned to London, it appeared, on the 5th of February, 1666, as " The 
London Gazette," under which name it still exists. It was placed at 
once under Sir Joseph Williamson, Under-Secretary of State (from 
whom Addison had his Christian name), and his deputy writer of it 
was, for the first five years, Charles Perrot, M.A., of Oriel. L'Estrange 
set up, in November, 1675, the first commercial journal, " The City 
Mercury," and in 1679 an " Observator," in defence of the king's party. 
In April, 1680, the first literary journal appeared, as a weekly or fort- 
nightly catalogue of new books, the "Mereurius Librarius." Roger 
L'Estrange was a busy man. He published, in 1678, an abstract of 
"Seneca's Morals," and in 1680 a translation of "Tuily's Offices." 
James II. knighted him, and he published in 1687, in the king's 
interest, "A Brief History of the Times," chiefly about' what was called 
the Popish Plot. He died in 1704. 

12. In March, 1698, Jeremy Collier (b. 1650, d. 1726) 
published " A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of 
the English Stage : Together with the Sense of Antiquit}' upon 
the Argument." It spoke clearly and sharply the minds of 
man}', passed through several editions within a year, and 
raised a controversy in which the wits were worsted. Collier 
was a divine educated at Cambridge, who had been Rector 
of Ampton, Suffolk, then Lecturer at Gra}-'s Inn, and one 
of the non-jurors at the Revolution, and had been imprisoned 
in Newgate for maintaining the cause of James II. He had 
earned credit b} r writing " Essaj's upon Several Moral Sub- 
jects" — Pride, Duelling, General Kindness, Fame, etc. — 
when he made his plain-spoken but intemperate attack on the 
immodesty and profaneness of the stage of his own time, with 



488 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650. 

evidence drawn from Dryden, and from the last new plays of 
Congreve and Vanbrugh. He published in the year of Queen 
Anne's death the second of the two folio volumes of his " Ec- 
clesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, from 
the First Planting of Christianity to the End of the Reign of 
King Charles the Second, with a brief Account of the Affairs of 
Religion in Ireland, collected from the best Ancient Histori- 
ans." In 1721 appeared the original supplement to his transla- 
tion of Moreri's " Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical 
Dictionary," which he had issued in three volumes folio in 
1701 and 1706. 

13. Gerard Langbaine was son of a learned father of like name, who 
edited Longinus, and became keeper of the archives and provost of 
Queen's College, Oxford. Langbaine, the younger, was born at Oxford, 
in 1656, and took lively interest in the stage. He became senior beadle 
of the university, and died in 1692. He wrote an appendix to a cata- 
logue of graduates, a new catalogue of English plays, and published at 
Oxford, in 1691, "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets; or, 
some Observations and Kemarks on the Lives and Writings of all those 
that have published either Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Pas- 
torals, Masques, Interludes, Farces, or Operas, in the English Tongue." 
Langbaine spoke in this book of Wycherley as one whom he was proud 
to call his friend, and a " gentleman whom I may boldly reckon among 
poets of the first rank, no man that I know, except the excellent Jonson, 
having outdone him in comedy." Of Shad well, Langbaine said, " I own 
I like his comedies better than Mr. Dryden' s, as having more variety of 
characters, and those drawn from the life. . . . That Mr. Shadwell has 
preferred Ben Jonson for his model I am very certain of; and those who 
will read the preface to ' The Humorists ' may be sufficiently satisfied 
what a value he has for that great man; but how far he has succeeded 
in his design I shall leave to the reader's examination." Of Shadwell' s 
play of " The Virtuoso," printed in 1676, Langbaine said that the Uni- 
versity of Oxford had applauded it, " and, as no man ever undertook to 
discover the frailties of such pretenders to this kind of knowledge, 
before Mr. Shadwell, so none since Mr. Jonson' s time ever drew so 
many different characters of humor, and with such success." 



CHAPTER XI. 

SECOND HALF OP THE SEVENTEENTH CEN- 
TURY: THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
WRITERS. 

1. John Bunyan. — 2. Richard Baxter. — 3. John Howe. — 4. George Fox. — 5. Rob- 
ert Barclay.— 6. William Penn.— 7. Sir George Mackenzie. — 8. Isaac Barrow. 
9. John Tillotson. — 10. Robert Leighton.— 11. William Beveridge. — 12. 
Samuel Parker. — 13. Thomas Ken; George Morley. — 14. William Sherlock. 
— 15. Robert South ; Edward Stillingfleet ; Thomas Tenison. 

1. John Bunyan was born in 1G28, the son of a poor 
tinker, at Elstow, in Bedfordshire. He was sent to a free school 
for the poor, and then worked with his father. As a youth of 
seventeen he was combatant in the civil war. He was married, 
at nineteen, to a wife who helped him to recover the art of read- 
ing, over the only books she had — " The Practice of Piety " 
and " The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven." He went regu- 
larly to church, but joined in the sports after the Sunday after- 
noon's service, which had been a point of special defiance to the 
Puritans, b}' the proclamation of James I. in 1618, re-issued by 
Charles I. in 1G33. Once Bunyan was arrested in his Sunday 
sport by the imagination of a voice from heaven. Presently he 
gave up swearing, bell-ringing, and games and dances on the 
green. Then came the time of what he looked upon as his con- 
version, brought about by hearing the conversation of some 
women as he stood near with his tinker's barrow. They re- 
ferred him to their minister. He sa}'s that he was tempted to 
sell Christ, and heard, when in bed one morning, a voice that 
reiterated, " Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him." This condition 
was followed by illness which was mistaken for consumption ; 
but Bunjan recovered, and became robust. In 1657 he was 
deacon of his church at Bedford, and his private exhortations 
caused him to be invited to take turns in village preaching. 

480 



490 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

Country people came to him by hundreds. Only ordained min- 
isters might preach. In 1658 complaint was lodged against 
Bunyan ; but under the Commonwealth he was left unmolested. 
Upon the Restoration, still incurring the penalty for unauthor- 
ized preaching, he was committed to prison in November, 1660, 
on the charge of going about to several conventicles in the 
country, to the great disparagement of the government of the 
Church of England. He was sent, aged thirty-two, to Bedford 
Jail for three months. As he would not conform at the end of 
that time, he was recommitted. He was not included in the 
general jail delivery at the coronation of Charles II., in April, 
1661. His wife — she was his second wife — appealed three 
times to the judges, and urged that she had u four small children 
that cannot help themselves, one of which is blind, and we have 
nothing to live upon but the charity of good people." She 
appealed in vain. tk I found myself," said Bunyan, " encom- 
passed with infirmities. The parting with my wife and poor 
children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of 
the flesh from the bones, and that not only because I am some- 
what too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should 
have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, 
and wants that my poor family was like to meet with should I 
be taken from them, especially m} r poor blind child, who lay 
nearer my heart than all besides. Oh ! the thoughts of the hard- 
ships I thought my poor blind one might go under would break 
my heart to pieces. ' Poor child ! ' thought I, ' what sorrow art 
thou like to have for thy portion in this world ! Thou must be 
beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thou- 
sand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should 
blow upon thee.' " So felt the great warm heart that was 
pouring out in Bedford Jail its love to God and man. Depth of 
feeling, vivid imagination, and absorbing sense of the realny of 
the whole spiritual world revealed to him in his Bible, made Bun- 
yan a grand representative of the religious feeling of the people. 
In simple, direct phrase, with his heart in every line, he clothed 
in visible forms that code of religious faith and duty which an 
earnest mind, unguided by traditions, drew with its own simple 
strength out of the Bible. Bunyan wrote much : profoundly 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN BUNYAN. 491 

religious tracts, prison meditations, a book of poems — "Di- 
vine Emblems ; or, Temporal Things Spiritualized, fitted for 
the use of Boys and Girls," and other occasional verse. The 
whole work of his life was like that indicated in his child's 
book, a spiritualizing of temporal things. Matter for him was 
the shadow, soul the substance ; the poor man whose soul Bun- 
yan leads by thoughts that it can follow, passes through a hard 
life with its dull realities all glorified. Look where he may, a 
man poor and troubled as himself has stamped for him God's 
image on some part of what he sees. As Bunyan himself 
rhymes : 

" We change our drossy dust for gold, 

From death to life we fly; 
We let go shadows, and take hold 

Of immortality." 

The first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress from this World 
to that which is to Come, delivered under the similitude of a 
Dream, wherein is discovered the Manner of his Setting Out, 
his Dangerous Journe}', and Safe Arrival at the Desired Coun- 
try," was written in Bedford Jail, where Bunyan was a prisoner 
for more than eleven years, from November, 1660, to March, 
1672, when a Royal declaration allowed Nonconformists (except 
Roman Catholics) to meet under their licensed ministers. His 
" Holy City " had been published in 1665 ; and after his release 
Bunyan published " a Defence of the Doctrine of Justification 
by Faith, a Confession of his Faith," an appeal entitled " Come 
and Welcome to Christ," before that "First Part of the Pil- 
grim's Progress " appeared in 1678, four years after the death 
of Milton. The allegory is realized with genius akin to that 
of the dramatist. 

Christian, with the Burden on his hack and the Book in his hand, sets 
out on his search for eternal life, and is at once engaged in a series of 
dialogues. Neighbors Obstinate and Pliable attempt to turn him back. 
Pliable goes a little way with him, but declines to struggle through the 
Slough of Despond, and gets out on the wrong side. Then Christian 
meets Mr. Worldly Wiseman, from the town of Carnal Policy, hard by, 
has a talk with him before he enters in at the Strait Gate, triumphs ovei 
Apollyon, passes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, overtakes 
his towns-fellow Faithful, who tells his experiences of the journey, and, 



492 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1650 

they then come upon Talkative, who was also of their town, son of one 
Say-well, of Prating Kow. All the dialogue is touched with humorous 
sense of characters drawn from life and familiar to the people, while the 
allegory blends itself everywhere with the poor man's Bible-reading, and 
has always its meaning broadly written on its surface, so that the sim- 
plest reader is never at a loss for the interpretation. The adventures of 
Christian in Vanity Fair are full of dramatic dialogue. Then there is 
still talk by the way between Christian and Hopeful before they lie down 
to sleep in the grounds of Doubting Castle, where they are caught in the 
morning by its master, the Giant Despair. There is life and character 
still in the story of their peril from the giant, before Christian remem- 
bers that he has "a key in his bosom," called Promise, that will open 
any lock in Doubting Castle. And so the allegory runs on to the end, 
lively with human interest of incident and shrewd character-painting 
by the way of dialogue, that at once chain the attention of the most 
illiterate; never obscure, and never for ten lines allowing its reader to 
forget the application of it all to his own life of duty for the love of God. 
The story ends with the last conflict of Christian and Hopeful, when 
at the hour of death they pass through the deep waters, leaving their 
mortal garments behind them in the river, and are led by the Shining 
Ones into the Heavenly Jerusalem. In 1682 appeared Bunyan's allegory 
of the ''Holy War;" and in 1684 the second part of "Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress," telling the heavenward pilgrimage of Christian's wife and seven 
children. England was England still, under a king who was tainting 
fashionable literature. Her highest culture produced in the reign of 
Charles II. " Paradise Lost; " and from among the people, who had little 
culture except that which they drew for themselves from the Bible, came 
the " Pilgrim's Progress." 

2. Richard Baxter was born in 1615, in Shropshire. His 
chief place of education was the free school at Wroxeter. 
From Wroxeter he went to be the one pupil of Richard Wick- 
steed, chaplain of Ludlow Castle ; then he taught in Wroxeter 
school for a few months, had cough with spitting of blood, and 
began the systematic stucty of theolog}'. " My faults," said 
Baxter, u are no disgrace to any university, for I was of none ; 
I have little but what I had out of books and inconsiderable 
helps of country tutors. Weakness and pain helped me to 
study how to die ; that set me on studying how to live." In 
1638 Baxter became head master of a free school just founded 
at Dudley, took orders, went to Bridgenorth, and was forced 
by Laud's Church policy into Nonconformity. In 1640 he set- 
tled in Kidderminster, whence he was driven after two years by 



To A.D. 1700.] JOHN HOWE. 493 

Royalist opposition. His life and his thoughts were unsettled 
by the Civil War. He signed the Covenant, and afterwards 
repented. He was with the army of the Parliament as military 
chaplain, and found there that " the most frequent and vehe- 
ment disputes were for liberty of conscience, as the}' called it 
— that is, that the civil magistrate had nothing to do to deter- 
mine matters of religion by constraint and restraint." He bat- 
tled against their opinions, and was unpopular, but towards 
the close of the Civil Wars Baxter had a severe illness, and it 
was during this illness that he wrote his u Saints' Everlasting 
Rest," first published in 1653. Under the Commonwealth, 
Baxter was opposed to Cromwell, argued privately with him on 
his position in the state, and supported Monarchy in the politi- 
cal discussions of the da}*, as in his -'Holy Commonwealth; 
or, Political Aphorisms, opening the true Principles of Govern- 
ment." 

Charles II. made him one of his chaplains, and also offered 
him a bishopric, which Baxter declined. For his nonconformity, 
he was subsequently persecuted ; and at last, at the age of 
seventy, he was tried before Judge Jeffreys for seditious libel 
in complaint of the wrongs of Dissenters, in his "Paraphrase 
on the New Testament," published in 1685. " Leave thee to 
thyself," said James's judge to the old man, whose friends 
thronged the court about him, " and I see thou wilt go on as 
thou hast begun ; but, by the grace of God, I'll look after thee. 
I know thou hast a mighty part}-, and I see a great many of 
the brotherhood in corners waiting to see what will become of 
the mighty don, and a doctor of the party at your elbow ; but, 
by the grace of Almighty God, I will crush you all." Baxter, 
unable to pay a fine of five hundred marks, was for the next 
eighteen months in prison. He died in 1691. He was a pro- 
lific writer. His works number at least a hundred and sixty- 
eight titles, and have been collected in twenty-three volumes. 
His most popular work, besides the one first mentioned, is his 
" Call to the Unconverted." 

3. John Howe, Cromwell's chaplain, was fifteen years 
younger than Baxter. He was born in 1630, at Loughborough, 
where his father was minister of the parish. When John Howe 



494 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

was about three years old, his father was suspended and con- 
demned to fine, imprisonment, and recantation by the High 
Commission Court, for opposing "The Book of Sports," and 
for praying in his church " that God would preserve the prince 
in the true religion, which there was cause to fear." King 
James I.'s Declaration to his subjects concerning lawful sports 
to be used on Sundays was published in 1618, and professed 
to have originated in the desire to take awa}' a hindrance to 
the conversion of Roman Catholics by checking the Puritans 
in their endeavor to repress "lawfull recreation and exercise 
upon the Sundayes afternoone, after the ending of all divine 
service." Charles I. re-issued this declaration in 1633, with 
an added command for the observance of wakes. The reprint 
of James's proclamation with the ratification of Charles added 
was that " Book of Sports" which Howe's father was punished 
for opposing. He escaped to Ireland, and was there till 1641, 
when he returned with his bo}", and settled in Lancashire. In 
1647, John Howe, aged seventeen, entered Christ's College, 
Cambridge, as a sizar. He took his degree of B.A. at Cam- 
bridge, and was at Oxford in the first years of the Common- 
wealth. He formed there his own system of theology, became 
M.A. in 1652, was ordained, and became, at two and twenty, 
pastor at Great Torrington, in Devonshire. The energ} T with 
which in these days the religious life of England was animating 
the great social changes may be illustrated b}' Howe's work for 
his flock on any one of the frequent fast-da}'S. He began with 
them at nine a.m., prayed during a quarter of an hour for bless- 
ing upon the day's work, then read and explained a chapter for 
three-quarters of an hour, then prayed for an hour, then 
preached for an hour and prayed again for half an hour, then 
retired for a quarter of an hour's refreshment — the people 
singing all the while — returned to his pulpit, pra}*ed for 
another hour, preached for another hour, and finished at four 
p.m., with one half-hour more of prayer, doing it all singly, 
and with his whole soul in it all. In 1656 he happened to be in 
London on a Sunda}-, and went, out of curiosity, to Whitehall 
Chapel, to see the Lord Protector and his family. But the Lord 
Protector saw also the } T oung divine in his clerical dress ; 



To A.D. 1700.] GEORGE FOX. 495 

requested to speak with him after service, and asked him to 
preach on the following Sunday. He preached, was asked to 
preach again, and was at last urged by Cromwell to stay by him 
as his domestic chaplain. He took that office, and was made 
also lecturer at St. Margaret's, Westminster, the parish church 
of the House of Commons. In three months he was writing 
from "Whitehall to Baxter for counsel as to those duties of 
which it would be most useful for him to remind the rulers, and 
he was supporting at headquarters a plan of Baxter's for pro- 
ducing a more open fellowship among Christians of hitherto 
contending sects. Zealous and fearless enough to preach before 
Cromwell against a point of the Protector's own faith, Howe 
was thoroughly tolerant. When Thomas Fuller was about to 
appear before the Triers — a board for examining ministers 
before they were inducted to a charge — he said to Howe, 
good-humoredly, "You may observe, sir, that I am a pretty 
corpulent man, and I have to go through a passage that is veiy 
strait ; be so kind as to give me a shove and help me through." 
The chaplain got him through. Howe was Cromwell's chaplain 
to the last, and remained in the same office during the nine 
months' rule of the Protector's son, Richard. The best of his 
man}' books, " The Living Temple," appeared in two parts, in 
1676 and 1702. Howe lived till 1705. 

4. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, was 
about four years older than Bunyan. He was born at Fenny 
Drayton, Leicestershire, in Jul}', 1624, the son of a respectable 
weaver. He was taught reading and writing, and then placed 
with a shoemaker, who also kept sheep. Fox minded the sheep. 
His thought from childhood was fixed upon Bible study, he was 
true of word, and as he took the Scripture "Verily" for his 
most solemn form of assertion, it was understood that, " If 
George says ' Verily,' there is no moving him." At twenty, in 
obedience to words that seemed to answer prayer, he left his 
home, and, having means enough for simple life without a trade, 
spent about nine months in towns where he was unknown, and 
free to wander and reflect. He made himself a suit of leather 
clothes, which would last long without renewal, and gave himself 
up to intense religious meditation. He came home still un- 



496 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

settled, and again moved restlessly about, profoundly dwelling 
upon the relation of his soul to God. The result was uttermost 
rejection of all forms and ceremonies as a part of true religion. 
" God," he said to himself, " dwells not in temples made with 
hands, but in the hearts of his obedient people." The church 
of Christ was, he felt, a living church ; and he became zealous 
against reverence paid to churches of brick and stone, which he 
denied to be churches, and thenceforth called steeple-houses. 
He not only set himself against those parts of ceremonial which 
had been a source of contest from the days of Cra inner to the 
da} r s of Laud, but utterly against all ceremonial, in Church and 
State. He realized to his own mind a Christian commonwealth 
in which the civil power is obeyed as far as conscience permits, 
and, if disobe} T ed, never resisted ; in which the great religious 
bond of love makes all men equal before God, by teaching man 
to be the Friend of man. In such a community there should be 
no untrue forms of ceremonial, no reverence by using the plural 
pronoun, and addressing one as if he were two, by scraping the 
foot, or uncovering the head. In all things the simple word of 
truth was to be all-sufficient, so that Christians would swear not 
at all, but their word would be simply Yea or Nay. He would 
have a church of souls with no paid minister, no formal minister 
of an}' kind, no formal prayers, and no formal preaching. At 
the meetings of such a church there should none speak unless 
it were borne in upon any one that there was something to say 
fresh from the heart, but in that case each man or woman was 
free to address the assembled friends. It was in 1647 that Fox 
began to spread his opinions, and gather friends. Some of their 
first meetings were held at Dukinfield and Manchester. The 
protest against formalism was so complete and so unflinching, 
that it brought the followers of Fox into constant collision with 
the usages and laws, or supposed laws, of society. If an oath 
had to be taken it was refused, because it was an oath, and the 
penalty of the refusal was borne. The hat not removed in 
church, or in a court of justice, or hy a son in presence of his 
father; the courteous t; 3'ou" transformed to "-thou" in days 
when " thou," as now in Germany, was used only to an inferior 
or to an equal friend — offences such as these against the estab- 



To A.D. 1700.] GEORGE FOX. 497 

lished forms led, Fox says, to "great rage, blows, punchings, 
beatings, and imprisonments." Fox was imprisoned first at 
Nottingham, in 1649, because the spire of the great church had 
caused him to "go and cry against 3-onder great idol and the 
worshippers therein." He stopped the preacher with contra- 
diction in the middle of his sermon, and was imprisoned for 
interruption of the service ; but his religious fervor won the 
heart of one of the sheriffs, and he was quickly released. But 
in 1650 he was arrested at Derby for telling " plain and homely 
truths" at a gathering summoned by Presbyterian preachers, 
was taken before the magistrates, and suffered much from 
Justice Gervas Bennet. It was this justice who first gave to 
Fox and his friends in derision the name of Quakers, because 
Fox bade him tremble and quake before the power of the Lord. 
At Derby, Fox was imprisoned for twelve months in the com- 
mon jail on a charge of blasphenry, while his religious life 
answered the charge, and he, as a guiltless man, refused either 
to go through the form of being bound to good behavior, or to 
allow any one to be surety for him. At last he was released 
unconditionally. He then preached and drew followers to his 
cause in Yorkshire and Westmoreland ; was charged with blas- 
phenrv at Lancaster; imprisoned, in 1653, at Carlisle, and re- 
leased when the case was brought before Cromwell's first 
Parliament. In his home at Drayton, in 1654, he disputed 
with the clerg}', was arrested on suspicion of holding or encour- 
aging seditious meetings, and was sent to Cromwell, who heard 
him at length while he was dressing, took his hand as he left, 
and said, with tears in his eyes : " Come again to my house, for 
if thou and I were but an hour a day together, we should be 
nearer one to the other." Fox was free again, but he and his 
followers were still persecuted. The character of other inter- 
views shows clearly that Cromwell recognized a true man in 
George Fox. His intense religious fervor led to acts of seem- 
ing insanity, when a sudden impulse, Biblical in its form, was 
taken with simple faith for a divine prompting, and acted upon 
straightway. The body also, both in John Bunyan and in 
George Fox, was sometimes fevered b}' the intensity of spir- 
itual life. Fox's followers were unflinching in their protest . 



498 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

In 1659 two thousand of them had suffered more or less in 
the foul jails ; and a hundred and sixty-four of the Friends 
offered themselves in place of that number of their fellow- 
worshippers whom they found to be in danger of death from 
continuance of their imprisonment. Fox wrote letters, of 
which many were collected, and about a hundred and fifty doc- 
trinal pieces. He lived until 1690, and his "Journal of his 
Life, Travels, Sufferings, etc.," was published in 1694. 

5. Soon after the Restoration, in 1662, there were more than 
forty-two hundred Quakers in prison at one time. In 1670, 
Robert Barclay, of Ury, near Aberdeen, then twenty-two 
years old, defended the Friends, whose society he had joined, 
in a treatise, published at Aberdeen, entitled, "Truth cleared 
from Calumnies." In 1676 he was confined with others in a 
prison so dark, that, unless the keeper set the door open or 
brought a candle, they could not see to eat the food brought in 
to them. In the same j T ear appeared Barcla} T 's " Apology for 
the True Christian Divinity as the same is held forth and 
preached by the People called in scorn Quakers, being a full 
Explanation and Vindication of their Principles and Doc- 
trines." It was first published in Latin, at Amsterdam, and 
then, translated by the author, was published in England. The 
address to Charles II., in the place of a dedication, called upon 
him for justice on behalf of a most peaceful body of his sub- 
jects, and said : " Thou hast tasted of prosperity and adversary ; 
thou knowest what it is to be banished fchy native countiy, to 
be overruled as well as to rule and sit upon the throne ; and 
being oppressed, thou hast reason to know how hateful the 
oppressor is both to God and man. If, after all these warnings 
and advertisements, thou dost not turn unto the Lord with all 
thy heart, but forget him who remembered thee in th}' distress, 
and give up tlrvself to follow lust and vanity, surety great will 
be tlry condemnation." 

6. In 1670 the Act of 1664 against Conventicles was renewed 
with increase of severity. Under this Act, William Penn 
had been imprisoned. He was born in 1644, the son of Ad- 
miral Sir William Penn, educated at Christchurch, Oxford, and, 
having turned Quaker, was twice turned out of doors by his 



ToA.D. 1700.] ISAAC BARROW. 499 

father. Then he was tolerated, but not helped, at home, and 
no effort was made to release him when he was imprisoned for 
attendance at religious meetings. He began at the age of 
twenty-four (in 1G68) to preach and write. For his second 
paper, "The Sandy Foundation Shaken," he was imprisoned 
seven months in the Tower, and he wrote in prison, at the age 
of twenty-five, his most popular book, "No Cross, no Crown." 
He obtained release by a vindication called " Innocenc}' with 
her Open Face." In 1670 his father died, reconciled to him. 
Penn inherited his estate ; then wrote, travelled, supported his 
religious faith ; and in 1681, for his father's services and debts 
to him from the Crown, obtained a grant of New Netherlands, 
thenceforward called Pennsylvania. In 1682, having published 
his scheme in "A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsyl- 
vania," he embarked for America, and founded Philadelphia. 
In 1684, the last year of Charles II., Penn revisited England. 
He published, in 1694, "A Brief Account of the Rise and 
Progress of the People called Quakers," and an "Account of 
his Travels in Holland and Germany in 1677, for the Service 
of the Gospel of Christ, by way of Journal." He died in 
1718; and his collected writings, published in 1726, fill two 
folio volumes. 

7. Sir George Mackenzie, of Rosehaugh, who died in 1691, aged 
fifty-five, was a good friend to English writers of his time, and himself a 
good writer. He was born at Dundee, of a known family, in 1636, stud- 
ied Civil Law at Bourges, in 1659 began life as an advocate, and next 
year published "Aretina; or, the Serious Romance." Then he became 
justice depute, afterwards was knighted. In 1667 his " Moral Gal- 
lantry" established moral duties as the principles of honor. He was 
one of the men most active in establishing the Advocates' Library, 
founded at Edinburgh in 1680, and had a high literary and social repu- 
tation when he died, in the reign of William and Mary. 

8. Isaac Barrow, born in 1630, educated at Charterhouse 
and Cambridge, became Fellow of Trinity, subscribed to the 
Covenant, but insisted on the erasure of his name. He studied 
science as well as divinity — astrononry, botan}', chemistry, and 
even anatomy. In 1655 he sold his books that he might have 
mone}' for travel. He found friends on his road ; visited Paris, 
Florence, Venice, and Constantinople, and came home, in 1659, 



500 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

through German}' and Holland. Then he took orders, was 
Professor of Greek at Cambridge, next also of geometry at 
Gresham College ; and after that Lucasian Mathematical Lec- 
turer at Cambridge until 1669, when he gave place to his friend, 
Isaac Newton. In 1672 the king made him Master of Trinity ; 
and he was Vice-Chancellor of the university when he died, 
in 1677, aged forty-seven. He wrote mathematical works, and 
sermons full of sense and piety. A collected edition of Isaac 
Barrow's English works was published by Archbishop Tillotson, 
111 four volumes folio, in 1683-87. 

9. John Tillotson was born in the same year as Barrow 
(1630), son of a clothier at Sowerb}-, near Halifax. He went 
as a Nonconformist to Clare Hall, Cambridge, and began life 
as a private tutor and curate to Dr. Wilkins, at St. Lawrence 
Jewiy. He made himself agreeable to authority, both after 
the Restoration and after the Revolution ; rose in the church, 
upholding simple acceptance of the ruling powers ; and was 
made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691, after the suspension 
of Sancroft. He died in 1694, and left to his widow unpub- 
lished sermons that fetched twenty-five hundred guineas. Yet 
Tillotson was not, like Leighton, a man of genius, capable of 
deep thought and grand expression. 

10. Robert Leighton (b. 1613, d. 1684) was the son of 
a man who in the reign of Charles I. had his nose slit and his 
ears cut, and was whipped from Newgate to Tyburn for offend- 
ing Government with two books called " Zion's Plea against 
the Prelacy" and 4i The Looking-Glass of the Holy War." 
Robert Leighton was a Scottish divine, thoughtful as well as 
eloquent. He came to London to resign the bishopric of Dun- 
blane, vexed b} T contention with the Presbyterians, and was 
sent back Archbishop of Glasgow. But he could endure the 
strife against Episcopalians in Scotland only for another year, 
resigned, withdrew to Sussex, and died in London in 1684. 
His sermons, published in 1692, are those of the greatest 
preacher in the Episcopal Church of the later Stuart period. 

11. William Beveridge (b. 1638, d. 1708), educated at 
Cambridge, was a Hebrew scholar at eighteen, and published 
at the age of twent} T , in Latin, a SjTiac grammar and treatise 



To A.D. 1700.] THOMAS KEN. 501 

on the excellence and usefulness of Oriental languages. He 
has left a hundred and fifty published sermons, besides theologi- 
cal tracts. He became chaplain to William III. at the Revo- 
lution, but was not made a bishop till Queen Anne's reign. 

12. Samuel Parker was a worldly defender of the Church 
against Nonconformity . He was born in 1640, the son of one 
of Cromwell's committee-men, and a strict Puritan until the 
Restoration, when he had been a year at Oxford. In 1665, at 
the age of twenty-five, he became one of the Fellows of the 
Royal Society, and carried experimental science into theology 
with a book in Latin of " Plrysico-Theological Essays concern- 
ing God " — kk Tentamina Ph}'sico-Theologica de Deo " — which 
got him the post of chaplain to Archbishop Sheldon, who also 
made him Archdeacon of Canterbury. In 1670 he published 
'• A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, wherein the Authority 
of the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in 
Matters of External Religion is Asserted;" and in 1672 he 
wrote a preface to a posthumous work of Archbishop Bram- 
liall's, " A Vindication of Bishop John Bramhall from the 
Fanatic Charge of Popeiy." This brought down on Samuel 
Parker's head the satire of Andrew Marvell. Parker was 
made Bishop of Oxford by James II., and died in 1688. 

13. Of the seven bishops who were thrown into the Tower 
by James II., one, Thomas Ken, has a place in literature. He 
was born in 1637, the son of an attorne}'. His mother died 
when he was four years old, and his home was then at the 
haberdasher's shop in Fleet Street kept by Izaak Walton ; for 
his half-sister, who took charge of him, was Izaak Walton's 
second wife. Ken was seven when Izaak Walton retired from 
business ; and his home was then in Walton's cottage by the 
banks of the Dove, in Staffordshire. He was sent, at thir- 
teen, to Winchester College. In 1656 he went to Oxford, and 
joined a musical society formed there ; for, like his sister, Mrs. 
Walton, Ken had a delightful voice, and he played on the lute, 
viol, and organ. As a student also, Ken began an epic poem 
on Edmund, the East Anglian king martyred by the Danes. 
He became M.A. in 1664, and chaplain to Lord Maynard, 
with the rectory of Easton Parva, just outside Lord Ma}^nard's 



502 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1650 

park, in Essex. Then he became domestic chaplain to George 
Morley, Bishop of Winchester. Then he obtained a fellowship 
of Winchester College, and lived in the Wykehamist house. 
The Bishop of Winchester gave him, in 1667, the living of 
Brixton, in the Isle of Wight ; and it was in the Isle of 
Wight, as Rector of Brixton, that Ken wrote his " Morning 
and Evening Hymns," using them himself, and singing them 
to his lute when he rose and when he went to rest. In 1669 
the Bishop of Winchester gave Ken other promotion, and he 
left the Isle of Wight. In 1675 he visited Rome with his 
nephew, young Izaak Walton. In 1681 he published his 
" Manual of Prayers for the Scholars of Winchester College." 
In 1683, Ken went as chaplain-in-chief of the fleet sent to Tan- 
gier, and in October, 1684, he was at the deathbed of his friend 
George Morley, whose writings had been collected in 1683 
as u Several Treatises written upon Several Occasions, by the 
Right Reverend Father in God, George, Lord Bishop of Win- 
ton, both before and since the King's Restauration : wherein his 
judgment is fully made known concerning the Church of Rome, 
and most of those Doctrines which are controverted betwixt 
her and the Church of England." Thomas Ken then became 
chaplain to Charles II., and was made Bishop of Bath and 
Wells not many da}'s before the king's death. Ken published a 
" Manual of Pra}er," " Seraphical Meditations," and a poem 
called ' ' Hymnotheo ; or, the Penitent ; ' ' but his fame rests on 
the ''Morning and Evening Hymns," and on his place among 
the Seven Bishops. Upon the Revolution, Ken refused to 
transfer to William the oaths he had sworn to James, and was 
accordingly tfc deprived," with some four hundred other clerg} r - 
men, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and six bishops. 
Bishop Ken was then housed by an old college friend, Lord 
Weymouth, who gave him a suite of rooms in his mansion of 
Longleate, in Wiltshire. Lord Weymouth also paid him an 
annuity of eighty pounds a year. From Longleate he paid 
occasional visits to friends, went abroad at first on his old white 
horse, and, when that was worn out, on foot, preaching, and 
collecting subscriptions for distressed non-jurors and their fam- 
ilies. At Longleate House he died, in March, 1711. 



To A.D. 1700.] THOMAS TENISON. 503 

14. Among the non-jurors was William Sherlock, a divine 
then high in repute, born in 1641, educated at Eton and Peter- 
house, Cambridge; in 1669 Rector of St. George's, Botolph 
Lane, and Prebenclaiy of St. Paul's ; then Master of the 
Temple, an active preacher and writer against the Roman Cath- 
olics. At the time of his deprivation, Sherlock published, in 
1689, the most popular of his books, " Practical Discourse con- 
cerning Death." His deprivation was soon followed by his 
acceptance of the established authority in 1691, when he was 
restored to his office of Master of the Temple, and made Dean 
of St. Paul's. In 1692 appeared his "Practical Discourse con- 
cerning a Future Judgment; " and he was involved in a long 
and bitter controversy upon the Trinity, with Robert South, a 
learned, zealous, and good-natured divine. Sherlock died in 
1707. 

15. Robert South was born in 1633, and educated at West- 
minster and Oxford. Upon the Restoration, he was made ora- 
tor of the university, and chaplain to Lord Clarendon ; in 1670 
he became canon of Christchurch, and in 1678 rector of Islip. 
He was distinguished for his wit, even in the pulpit. Eleven 
volumes of his sermons have been published. Ed-ward Stil- 
lingfleet (b. 1635, d. 1699) became Fellow of St. John's 
College, Cambridge, and at the Revolution was made Bishop 
of Worcester. He published, besides sermons and visitation- 
charges, treatises on theology, church history, and church 
government. Thomas Tenison (b. 1636, d. 1715) became 
Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1662; was 
made Bishop of Lincoln in 1691, and Archbishop of Canter- 
bury in 1694. He published a treatise against Hobbes, a work 
on Idolatry, some writings of Francis Bacon and of Sir Thomas 
Browne, and several sermons. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE, 



FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY. 



Charles Montague. 
Matthew Prior. 
Sir Richard Blackniore. 
Jonathan Swift. 
John Philips. 
Ambrose Philips. 
Thomas Tickell. 
Nicholas Rowe. 
Thomas Parnell. 
John Gay. 
Alexander Pope. 
Matthew Green. 
Allan Ramsay. 
James Thomson. 



POETS. 

John Dyer. 
William Somerville. 
Gilbert West. 
John Armstrong. 
William Shenstone. 
William Whitehead. 
Paul Whitehead. 
Richard Glover. 
Christopher Pitt. 
Stephen Duck. 
Edward Young. 
Robert Blair. 
William Collins. 
Richard Savage. 



Nicholas Rowe. 
Susanna Centlivre. 
John Hughes. 
Joseph Addison. 
Richard Steele. 



DRAMATISTS. 

John Gay. 
Colley Cibber. 
George Lillo. 
Edward Moore. 
David Mallet. 



CRITICS AND SATIRISTS. 



John Dennis. 
Charles Gildon. 
Joseph Spence. 
Joseph Addison. 
Richard Steele. 



John Arbuthnot. 
Alexander Pope. 
Lewis Theobald. 
Jonathan Swift. 
William Warburton. 



WRITERS ON SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND 
RELIGION. 



Thomas Burnet. 
William Whiston. 
Richard Bentley. 
George Berkeley. 
David Hartley. 
Bernard de Mandeville. 
Lord Bolingbroke. 
Isaac Watts. 



Joseph Butler. 
John Wesley. 
Charles Wesley. 
William Warburton. 
Francis Atterbury. 
Samuel Clarke. 
Benjamin Hoadly. 



HISTORIANS, PAMPHLETEERS, 
NOVELISTS. 



AND 



John Oldmixon. 
George Lyttelton. 
Daniel Defoe. 



Samuel Richardson. 
Henry Fielding. 



CHAPTER XII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: 
POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND CRITICISM. 

1. "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse." — 2. Charles Montague. — 3. Matthew 
Prior. — 4. Sir Richard Blackmore. — 5. John Dennis; Charles Gildon; Joseph 
Spenee. — 6. Jonathan Swift. — 7. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.— 8. 
John Philips. — 9. Ambrose Philips. — 10. Thomas Tickell. — 11. Nicholas 
Kowe. — 12. Susanna Centlivre. — 13. John Hughes. — 14. John Arbuthnot. — 
15. Thomas Parnell. — 16. Lewis Theobald; Colley Cibber. — 17. John Gay. 

— 18. Alexander Pope. — 19. Matthew Green. — 20. Allan Ramsay. — 21. James 
Thomson. — 22. John Dyer; William Sonierville. — 23. Gilbert West; John 
Armstrong. — 24. William Shenstone. — 25. George Lillo; Edward Moore; 
David Mallet; Vincent Bourne; William Whitehead ; Paul Whitehead ; Richard 
Glover; Christopher Pitt ; Stephen Duck. — 26. Edward Young ; Robert Blair. 

— 27. William Collins. — 28. Richard Savage. 

1. Dryden's powerful poem, "The Hind and the Panther," 
published in 1687, represents a series of theological and politi- 
cal discussions carried on bj T animals, and all contrived for the 
support of Roman Catholicism. Such a poem invited caricature ; 
and this soon came in the form of an imitation of " The Re- 
hearsal." It was entitled " The Hind and the Panther Trans- 
versed to the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse." 
"Mr. Bayes " is boasting to "Mr. Johnson" of his fable of 
the hind and the panther, in defence of his religion. " An apt 
contrivance, indeed," says Johnson. "What, do you make a 
fable of your religion?" Bayes : "A}*, I'gad, and without 
morals, too ; for I tread in no man's steps ; and to show jo\x 
how far I can outdo an}' thing that ever was writ in this kind, 
I have taken Horace's design, but, I'gad, have so outdone him, 
you shall be ashamed for }'our old friend. You remember in 
him the Stor} T of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse ; what 
a plain, simple thing it is ! it has no more life and spirit in it, 
I'gad, than a hobby-horse ; and his mice talk so meanly, such 
common stuff, so like mere mice, that I wonder it has pleased 

507 



508 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

the world so long. But now will I undeceive mankind, and 
teach 'em to heighten and elevate a fable. I'll bring }<ou in 
the very same mice disputing the depth of philosoplry, search- 
ing into the fundamentals of religion, quoting texts, fathers, 
councils, and all that ; I'gad, as you shall see, either of 'em 
could easily make an ass of a country vicar. Now, whereas 
Horace keeps to the drj T , naked story, I have more copiousness 
than to do that, I'gad. Here, I draw you general characters, 
and describe all the beasts of the creation ; there, I launch out 
into long digressions, and leave my mice for twenty pages 
together ; then I fall into raptures, and make the finest solilo- 
quies, as would ravish you. Won't this do, think you?" 
Johnson : " Faith, sir, I don't well conceive you ; all this about 
two mice?" Bayes : "A}-, why not? Is it not great and 
heroical? But come, you'll understand it better when 3011 hear 
it ; and pray be as severe as you can ; I'gad, I defy all critics. 
Thus it begins : 

"'A milk-white mouse, immortal and uncbang'd, 
Fed on soft cheese, and o'er the dairy rang'd: 
Without, unspotted ; innocent within, 
She 'fear' d no danger, for she knew no gin.' " 

This new jest upon Diyden was hy two young men who became 
afterwards famous, Charles Montague and Matthew Prior. - 

2. Charles Montague, born in April, 1661, was the fourth 
son of the Hon. George Montague, a younger son of the first 
Earl of Manchester. He was sent at fourteen to "Westminster 
School, where he formed so intimate a friendship with George 
Stepney that he avoided a scholarship at Oxford, and got leave 
from his friends to join Stepney at Trinity College, Cambridge. 
At the death of Charles II., Montague contributed to the 
volume of condolences and congratulations for the new king, 
that was put together according to custom. His poem, tu On 
the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty, King Charles II.," 
pleased Lord Dorset and Sir Charles Seclley so well that they 
invited Montague to town. The piece was a clever but un- 
measured panegyric, opening with this bold couplet : 

" Farewell, great Charles, monarch of blest renown, 
The best good man that ever fill'd a throne." 



To A.D. 1750.] MATTHEW PRIOR. 509 

Dorset and Sedley were on the popular side, in opposition 
to the king's designs, made more alarming by his setting 
up of a standing army for aid in suppressing possible resist- 
ance to them. At their suggestion, Montague joined Prior 
in reply to Diyden's "Hind and Panther." After the ac- 
cession of William III., he rose rapidly in political life; and 
in 1694 became Chancellor of the Exchequer, acquiring 
great distinction by his financial skill. He became Earl of 
Halifax, and died in 1715, with an extraordinary reputation 
for literary as well as political abilities. His works, consist- 
ing of poems and speeches, were published in the 3'ear of his 
death. 

3. His associate in writing the famous burlesque on Dryden, 
Matthew Prior, was born in 1664. Having lost his father 
when young, he came into the care of his uncle, Samuel Prior, 
who kept the tk Rummer " Tavern, near Charing Cross. It was 
a house frequented b}- nobility and gentiy ; so it chanced that 
the Earl of Dorset found in it young Prior, who had been 
taught at Westminster School, reading Horace for his amuse- 
ment. He talked to him, saw him to be clever, and paid the 
cost of sending him to St. John's College, Cambridge. Prior 
was then eighteen. He took his B.A. degree in 1686, returned 
to London, and took his place among the 3 r oung wits of the 
"Whig party by the brightness of the satire upon Dryden's 
V Hind and Panther." He made friends also by the good 
quality of a poem on the Deity, written according to a practice 
of his college to send every year some poems upon sacred 
subjects to the Earl of Exeter in return for a benefaction by one 
of his ancestors. In 1690 he was appointed Secretary of the 
Embassy at the Congress opened at the Hague in January, 
1691 ; and thus entered upon a diplomatic career in which he 
was greatly distinguished. At the end of June, 1692, after a 
memorable siege, the French completed the capture of Namur 
and its forts. Boileau then celebrated the gloiy of Louis XIV. 
in a Pindaric ode, which served the purpose also of a shot 
at Perrault in the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. 
Matthew Prior afterwards returned Boileau' s fire with a laugh- 
ing comment upon his ode, which he followed stanza for stanza, 



510 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

in "An English Ballad on the Taking of Namur by the King 
of Great Britain," 1695; for in that year there was another 
siege of Namur, and, on the 31st of August, William III. took 
the citadel by open assault in daytime, and in presence of 
Villeroi's army of a hundred thousand that would not risk 
battle. Prior was in high diplomatic service when he wrote, 
in the century year, his finest ode, the " Carmen Seculare," in 
praise of William. After the death of William, Prior deserted 
the Whigs for the Tories, and conducted a paper in the interest 
of the latter, called " The Examiner." He assisted in nego- 
tiating the treat} 1 - of Utrecht, and was sent as ambassador to 
Paris. His political career ended with the reign of Queen 
Anne. He died in 1721. Besides his prose writings, consti- 
tuting two volumes of " Miscellaneous Works," and including 
a "History of his Own Time," he left numerous small poems ; 
also, " Alma ; or, The Progress of the Mind," in three cantos ; 
and, " Solomon on the Vanity of the World," a poem in three 
books. 

4. Sir Richard Blackmore (b. about 1650, d. 1729) was 
educated at Westminster School, and St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, 
where he too"k the degree of M.A. in 1676 ; graduated in 
medicine at Padua, and became a prosperous physician in 
Cheapside. In 1695 he published "Prince Arthur," an epic 
poem in ten books. In his preface Blackmore attacked the 
abuse of wit upon the stage, said that in its other departments 
the poetry of the day had become impure ; and that for this 
reason, among others, he had, in the intervals of business, 
written "Prince Arthur." "I was willing," he said, "to 
make one effort towards the rescuing of the Muses out of the 
hands of those ravishers, and to restore them to their sweet and 
chaste mansions, and to engage them in an employment suitable 
to their dignity." He then prosed upon epic poetiy, of which, 
he said, the purpose was "to give men right and just concep- 
tions of religion and virtue ; " and told his public that he had 
endeavored to form himself on Virgil's model, substituting 
Christian for pagan machineiy — that is to sa} T , he used Lu- 
cifer, Raphael, Uriel, etc., instead of heathen deities. His 
Arthur sailed to the Saxon coast ; devils and angels affected 



To A.D. 1750.I JOHN DENNIS, 511 

the weather ; but at last he and his people landed on Hoel's 
shore of Albion, where 

"Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne 
Relieve the toil they suffered on the main; 
But what more cheered them than their meats and wine 
Was wise instruction and discourse divine 
From godlike Arthur's mouth." 

The Fury, Persecution, stirred Hoel ; but an angel sent him to 
Arthur, from whom he heard a sermon. In Book III., Hoel 
asked for more, and Arthur preached him another sermon. In 
Book IV., Lucius, at a supper of Hoel's, being asked to tell 
Prince Arthur's story, began in Virgilian st}'le, 

" How sad a task do your commands impose, 
Which must renew insufferable woes." 

Finally, an Ethelina and a kingdom awaited the result of single 
combat between Prince Arthur and King Tollo, and the poem 
closed thus : 

" So by Prince Arthur's arms King Tollo slain 
Fell down, and lay extended on the plain." 

Blackmore became a butt of the wits whom he attacked. He 
was a commonplace man with an amiable faith in himself, and 
without intellect to distinguish between good and bad in poetry. 
His religious purpose was sincere, and it gave dignity to his 
work in the e}*es even of Locke and Addison. Blackmore 's 
" King Arthur," in twelve books, appeared in 1697, the year in 
which he was knighted and made one of the physicians to King 
William. In 1700 appeared Blackmore 's "Paraphrase on the 
Book of Job, the Songs of Moses, Deborah, and David, and on 
Four Select Psalms, some Chapters of Isaiah, and the Third 
Chapter of Habakkuk ; ' ' and in the same }-ear he defied his 
satirists, and continued his attack upon immoral verse with a 
"Satire on Wit." Afterwards, he published "A Collection 
of Poems," "Creation," "The Redeemer," and numerous 
works in avowed prose, on theological, historical, and medical 
subjects. 

5. John Dennis (b. 1657, d. 1734), son of a London sad- 
dler, after education at Harrow and at Caius College, Cam- 
bridge, travelled in France and Italy, and began his career as 



512 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

a writer in the reign of William III., with " The Passion 
of Byblis" in 1692, and in the same year "The Impartial 
Critic ; or, some Observations on Mr. Rymer's late Book, 
entitled a Short View of Tragedy." In 1693 Dennis published 
"Miscellanies in Verse and Prose." In 1695 he published a 
poem, "The Court of Death," on the death of Queen Mary; 
and in 1696, " Letters on Milton and Congreve," and " Letters 
upon Several Occasions, Written by and between Mr. Wycher- 
ley, Mr. Dryden, Mr. Moyle, Mr. Congreve, and Mr. Dennis ; " 
also adverse "Remarks" on Blackmore's "Prince Arthur." 
In 1697 he published " Miscellaneous Poems ; " in 1698 " The 
Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to Gov- 
ernment, and to Religion, occasioned by a late Book written by 
Jeremy Collier, M.A. ; " in 1701 a little treatise on the "Ad- 
vancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry; " and in 1702 
an " Essay on the Navy," a tract against Sacheverell's paily, 
" Priestcraft dangerous to Religion and Government," a volume 
of collected "Works," and, on the death of William III., a 
poem sacred to his memon T , " The Monument." There was a 
vein of good sense and liberality of thought in Dennis's writ- 
ing, and he was a good critic to the extent of his moderate 
abilit}'. He produced plays also, poor ones : "A Plot and No 
Plot," in 1697; " Rinaldo and Armida," in 1699; in 1702, 
" Iphigenia," and "The Comical Gallant; or, the Amours of 
Sir John Falstaff, with an Essay on Taste in Poetiy." Thus 
Dennis's literary industry had earned him a foremost position 
among critics by the time of Queen Anne's accession. He was 
then forty-five } r ears old. By the severity of his published 
comments on the writings of his contemporaries, he involved 
himself in many quarrels with them ; and was an especial vic- 
tim of the sarcasms of Pope and Swift. In 1711 he attacked 
Pope in " Reflections Critical and Satirical upon a late Rhap- 
sody called An Essay on Criticism;" and in 1713, on the 
production of Addison's Cato, Dennis appeared as a hostile 
critic, with "Remarks upon Cato, a Tragedy." In 1718 
Dennis's "Letters" were published in two volumes; and in 
the same } r ear his " Select Works," consisting of plays, poems, 
etc., likewise in two volumes. In his old age, he became blind 
and extremely poor. 



To A.D. 1750.] JONATHAN SWIFT. 518 

Dennis was commonly called "the critic," in his daj' ; and 
he had two contemporaries who acquired some reputation in 
the same character, Charles Gildon and Joseph Spence. 

Charles Gildon, born in 1665, of a Roman Catholic family in Dorset- 
shire, having failed as an actor, became a critic of the narrowest French 
school, and produced, in the reign of George L, his "Complete Art of 
Poetry" (1718), a "Satirical Life of Defoe" (1719), and "The Laws of 
Poetry" (1720). He died in 1724. Joseph Spence, born in North- 
amptonshire in 1698, and educated at Winchester School and New Col- 
lege, Oxford, published in 1727 an " Essay on Pope's Odyssey." In 1728 
he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and, in 1742, Professor of 
Modern History, and Rector of Great Horwood, in Buckinghamshire. 
In August, 1768, he was found accidentally drowned in his garden. 
Spence's chief original work was " Polymetis " (1747), an inquiry into 
the relations between the works of the Roman poets and the remains of 
ancient art. 

6. Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Nov. 30, 1667. 
By his uncle, Godwin Swift, he was sent to school at Kil- 
kenny, and then to Trinity College, Dublin, where he failed 
when he first went up for his B.A. degree, and obtained it 
afterwards " by special grace," a phrase there implying special 
disgrace. In the 3-ear of the Revolution, Swift's uncle failed 
in intellect, lost speech and memory, and was unable to do 
more for his nephew. Swift went therefore to his mother, who 
was a widow and very poor ; and by her advice he presented 
himself to Sir William Temple, whose wife was distantly related 
to her. Sir William became young Swift's friend, enabled him 
to study at Oxford, where he was admitted at once to the 
degree obtained at Dublin, and where he graduated as M.A. 
He then lived with Sir William, at Moor Park, near Farnham, 
in Surrej*. After about two years with Sir William, Swift 
had a long and serious illness. It left him subject to fits of 
giddiness, first S3'mptoms of the disease of brain that modified 
his character, and towards the close of life destro}'ed his 
reason. He went for change of air to Ireland, and then 
returned to Sir William, who had left Moor Park for Sheen. 
At Sheen, King William sometimes paid unceremonious visits, 
to Sir William Temple. In one conversation, the king 
offered to make } T oung Swift a captain of horse. But Swift 



514 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

took orders, and went to Ireland, where Lord Capel, on 
Sir William's recommendation, gave him a prebend worth 
a hundred pounds a }~ear, which he gave up to return to 
Sheen. Sir William would use interest to get him something 
better, and Swift's heart was touched b} r the wit and kindness 
of Hester Johnson, daughter of Sir William's steward. Sir 
William died in 1700, leaving a thousand pounds to Hester 
Johnson, and a legac3' also to Swift, who was made Ms literary 
executor. Swift dedicated Temple's works to the king, and 
went to Ireland as secretary to the Earl of Berkeley, who had 
been appointed one of the two Lords Justices of Ireland. His 
office of secretary Swift did not long hold, but he obtained from 
Lord Berkeley the livings of Agher Laracor and Eathbeggin, 
together worth about two hundred and sixty pounds a 3~ear. 
He went at once to Laracor, and invited Hester Johnson with 
a female friend, named Dingley, to make her home in the same 
village. She did so ; and while Swift had the society of the 
woman he loved, he took care that they should never be alone 
together. He was violently angry when his sister married, 
about this time. He himself would not marry ; and when at 
last he did go through a private ceremony of marriage with 
Hester Johnson, whom he called "Stella," marriage was only 
a form. Their relations with each other remained as before, 
and they lived on opposite banks of the Liffey. Uncharitable 
reasons have been given for this. One reason, that Swift could 
hardly proclaim to the world, was sufficient. The seeds of 
insanity were in him ; that terrible disease can be inherited. 
He died as his Uncle Godwin died. Might not Swift feel that 
he and his sister had no right to many? And, for himself, if 
he thought so, he was surely right, whatever unsoundness of 
judgment he may have shown in the way he took, nevertheless, 
to satisf} T his best affections. 

Swift's first publication was at the close of William's reign. 
When Tory re-action then caused the House of Commons to 
impeach Lord Somers, the Earl of Halifax, the Earl of Orford, 
and the Earl of Portland, Swift published, in 1701, with covert 
reference to the political situation, "A Discourse of the Con- 
tests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in 



To A.D. 1750.I JONATHAN SWIFT. 515 

Athens and Rome." In this pamphlet Lord Somers figured 
as Aristldes, Halifax as Pericles. The Earl of Orford was 
Themistocles ; and the Earl of Portland, Phocion. 

Swift, who had graduated as D.D. in 1701, was in London in 
1704, and then published his " Tale of a Tub," and " Battle 
of the Books." "Tale of a Tub" is a very old English 
phrase for a nonsensical story, and had been used try Ben Jon- 
son for the title of a play. Swift's tale was a satire on behalf 
of charity and good works among men of different forms of 
faith, represented by Peter (Church of Rome), Martin (Church 
of England), and Jack (Dissent). In its main plan the 
"Tale of a Tub" is a wise book, and essentially religious, 
but its uncontrolled wit handled sacred things in a way shock- 
ing to many, and Swift was too good a partisan of his own 
church to make a book that should be itself a great example 
of the charity it recommended. If Swift had not written the 
" Tale of a Tub " he would have died a bishop. His " Battle 
of the Books " was suggested b}- the famous literary quarrel, 
in which Sir William Temple had engaged, over ancient and 
modern learning. From this time onward, he was a prolific 
writer of controversial pamphlets, on questions of theology 
and politics; including "An Argument to prove the Incon- 
venience of Abolishing Christianity," and " Letter on the 
Sacramental Test," in 1708; "A Project for the Advance- 
ment of Religion and the Reformation of Manners," in 1709 ; 
" The Conduct of the Allies," in 1712 ; " Public Spirit of the 
"Whigs," about 1713 ; and " Free Thoughts on the State of 
Public Affairs," in 1714. His writings and personal intrigues 
in politics made him a power in the State, but he got no pro- 
motion in the church, higher than that of the Deaneiy of St. 
Patrick's, which he received in 1713. 

In 1724 Swift published " The Drapier's Letters," against 
Wood's halfpence. Copper coin having become so scarce in 
Ireland that the chief manufacturers were paying their work- 
men with tin tokens, a patent was granted to William Wood, 
an ironmaster, of Wolverhampton, to make one hundred and 
eighty thousand pounds' worth of farthings and halfpence 
during fourteen years, for supply of copper coin to Ireland. 



516 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

Swift denounced the patent as an enrichment of William 
Wood at the expense of Ireland, which was to have its good 
money taken in exchange for copper coin of less than its 
nominal value. Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the Mint, 
and two of the assayers, testified that Wood's halfpence not 
only contained more copper than any before sent to Ireland, 
but also excelled former coinages u in goodness, fineness, 
and value of the metal." No matter. Writing as an Irish 
trader, M. B. Drapier, Swift raised a storm in Ireland. The 
" Drapier's Head " became a patriotic sign, and the Dean an 
idol of his countrymen. Government offered in vain a reward 
of three hundred pounds for evidence to prove who was the 
writer of the fourth letter, dated Oct. 13, 1724. The printer 
was arrested ; but when the grand jury was to find a true bill 
against him, a paper of the Drapier's, called " Seasonable 
Advice to the Grand Juiy," had found its wa} T to the hands 
of each of them, and they threw out the bill, though the 
Chief Justice sent them back several times to revise their 
return. Swift prevailed, Wood's patent had to be revoked, 
and the Irish sang the praises of their Dean : 

"Now we're free by nature, 
Let ns all our power exert : 
Since each human creature 
May his right assert. 

(Chorus.) Fill bumpers to the Drapier, 
Whose convincing paper 
Set us, gloriously, 
From brazen fetters free." 

Swift was now at work upon his " Travels into Several 
Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a sur- 
geon, and then a captain of several ships. " Of this book he 
had the first suggestion from a passage in the " Memoirs of 
Martinus Scriblerus ; " but it was also of the school of Cyrano 
de Bergerac's " Comic History of the States and Empires of the 
Moon," which had been twice translated into English (1659 
and 1687) , and Joseph Hall's " Mundus Alter et Idem." Swift 
brought ' k Gulliver " to London in April, 1726 ; was with Pope 
till August, while the book was being printed, and recalled to 



To A.D. 1750.] JONATHAN SWIFT. 517 

Ireland by illness of Stella, when it appeared, in the beginning 
of November, without the author's name. The first edition was 
sold in a week. Cleansed of impurities, it is now for its bright 
wit and bold flights of fancy read by children as a delightful tale 
of wonder. As a new book it was read by statesmen and men 
of the world as bitter political and social satire. Like " Robin- 
son Crusoe," it takes the form of a sailor's book of adventure 
in strange lands ; but there all likeness ends. Lemuel Gulli- 
ver's four voyages were : (1) To Lilliput, where English poli- 
tics of the Court of George I. are satirized in a people who are 
as men and women seen through a diminishing glass, and where 
Blefuscu stands for France ; (2) To Brobdingnag, where men 
and women are seen as through a magnifying glass, and the 
satire is continued with reference, particularly in the sixth chap- 
ter, to the politics of Europe; (3) To Laputa, etc. — satire 
against the philosophers ; and (4) to the country of the Hou- 
yhnhnms — satire upon the whole human race. Although Swift 
lived until the middle of the reign of George II., the chief 
work of his life was done before the death of George I. Stella 
being better, he was in London again with Pope in 1727, col- 
lecting three volumes of " Miscellanies," but had again to hurry 
back. He was ill himself in October, and Stella, then within 
a few weeks of her own death, denied ease to herself that she 
might be his tender nurse. Lines of his "To Stella, Visiting 
Me in my Sickness, October, 1727," end thus : 

' ' Best pattern of true friends, beware ; 
You pay too dearly for your care, 
If while your tenderness secures 
My life, it must endanger yours. 

For such a fool was never found 
Who pulled a palace to the ground, 
Only to have the ruins made 
Materials for an house decayed." 

Stella died in January, 1728, and all joy went out of Swift's 
life. His character lost what had softened its harsher lines. 
Disease of mind slowly increased upon him. In 1736 he was 
seized with a fit while writing, and he wrote little more. In 
1741 he was insane beyond hope, and in charge of a legal 
guardian until his death, at the age of seventy-eight, in 1745. 



518 MANVAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

7. Joseph Addison, son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, 
was born on May Day, 1672, at Milston, Wiltshire. About 
1677, his father became Archdeacon of Salisbury, and his son 
Joseph then went to a school at Salisbury. In 1683, Lancelot 
Addison became Dean of Lichfield ; and Joseph, aged eleTen, 
then went to school at Lichfield until 1685, when he was sent 
as a private pupil to the Charterhouse. There he found, 
among the bo} T s on the foundation, one of his own age, Richard 
Steele, who had been sent to the school a few months earlier, 
in 1684. Between Addison and Steele, as boys at the Charter- 
house, an enduring friendship was established. 

Richard Steele was not two months older than Addison. 
He was baptized on the 12th of March, 1672, as the son of 
Richard Steele, an attorney in Dublin. His father died when 
he was not quite fire years old, and he was in his thirteenth 
3 T ear when, on the nomination of the first Duke of Ormond, he 
was received as a foundation boy at the Charterhouse. Steele 
went home at holiday time with his friend Addison to the 
Lichfield Deanery, where he was on brotherly terms with the 
children of the household, and where the father gave his 
blessing to the friendship between his son Joseph and Richard 
Steele. Addison was only about two years at the Charter- 
house. He went to Oxford in 1687. Steele did not leave the 
Charterhouse for Oxford until March, 1690; and thus, at the 
beginning of the reign of William and Mary, their school- 
boy friendship was being renewed by Steele and Addison as 
students at Oxford. Addison's lines in the "Miscellany" 
for 1694, which addressed to Henry Sacheverell, at his re- 
quest, 

"A short account of all the muse-possest 
That down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times 
Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes," 

were the work of a young man with a bent for criticism, though 
not yet a critic. He echoed opinions of the French school, and 
followed the polite taste of the day. Of Chaucer he said that 
he was ' ' a merry bard : ' ' 

" But age has rusted what the poet writ. 
Worn out his language, and obscnr'd his wit: 



ToA.D. 1750.] ADDISON AND STEELE. 519 

In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain, 
Ajid tries to make his readers laugh in vain. 
Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage, 
In ancient tales amus'd a barb'rous age; 



But now the mystic tale, that pleas' d of yore, 
Can charm an understanding age no more ; 
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
While the dull moral lies too plain below." 

Shakespeare was simply left out of Addison's list. His next 
heroes were Cowley and Sprat — Great Cowley, whose " fault 
is only wit in its excess." 

" Blest man! who's spotless life and charming lays 
Employ'd the tuneful prelate in thy praise: 
Blest man! who now sball be for ever known, 
In Sprat's successful labors and thy own. 
But Milton next, with high and haughty stalks 
Unfetter'd in majestic numbers walks. 



Whate'er his pen describes I more than see, 
Whilst ev'ry verse, array'd in majesty, 
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws, 
And seems above the critic's nicer laws." 

A genuine admiration of Milton, who did not appeal in vain 
to young Addison's religious feeling, is the most interesting 
feature of these lines, which went on from Milton to Waller, 
Roscommon, Denham, Dry den, Congreve, Montague, and Dor- 
set, in the manner of one who was being educated in " an 
understanding age," trained by polite France in a shallow self- 
sufficienc}". All the old music, with its sweet variety of number, 
was fled. There were no more sonnets ; they took flight out of 
our literature at the coming in of the French influence. Narra- 
tive was to be after the manner of France, in rhymed couplets ; 
our old "riding rhyme," so called because it was the rhyme 
that described the Canterbury pilgrims, was now dubbed 
u heroic verse," and the predominance of this metre had now 
become one characteristic of the outward form of English 
poetry. 

Richard Steele wrote his earliest published verse a few months 
after the appearance of Addison's ' ' Account of the Poets. ' ' But 



520 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1700 

Steele's interest was above all things in life itself, and then in 
literature as the expression of it. He showed his interest in 
men by writing a comedy at college, and was content to burn it 
when a fellow- student thought it bad. His first printed verse 
was on the death of Queen Mary, by small-pox, in the Christ- 
mas week of 1694 ; and Steele used more than once one of its 
opening hues, expressing his sense of the earnest under-tone of 
life — "Pleasure itself has something that's severe." Since 
the throne was not vacant, Parliament still sat, and for the first 
time a procession of the two Houses of Lords and Commons 
joined in the funeral pomp of an English sovereign. Steele's 
poem, of about a hundred and fifty lines, was called " The 
Procession." 

Addison, aged twenty-three, addressed to King William from 
Oxford a paper of verses on the capture of Namur. They 
united evidence of ability" with declaration of Whig principles, 
and were sent through Sir John Somers, a law3*er and patron 
of letters, who had been counsel for the seven bishops, under 
James II. Somers was William's first Solicitor-General, had 
become Lord Keeper, and was made in 1695 Lord Chancellor 
and a peer. Addison, then destined for the church, sought, as 
was usual, to advance his fortunes by the way of patronage ; 
and it was not without effect, that, in lines sent with the poem, 
he credited Somers with M immortal strains ; " spoke of Britain 
advanced "by Somers' counsels, and by Nassau's sword;" 
and sought the Lord Keeper's good word — " For next to what 
you write is what you praise." Thus Addison secured one 
patron. He had already, in 1694, aimed a shaft of compliment, 
in his Account of the Poets, at the noble Montague, " For wit. 
for humor, and for judgment famed." In 1697 he addressed 
to Montague, who was a good Latin scholar, and then Chancel- 
lor of the Exchequer, some patriotic Latin verses on the Peace 
of Ryswick ("Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita"). 
Thus he completed the capture of another patron ; and by 
Somers and Montague he was induced to give up thoughts of 
taking priests' orders, and accept a pension of three hundred 
pounds a year while travelling to prepare himself for diplomatic 
life. Before starting:. Addison brought out at Oxford, in 



To A. D. i 7 50.] ADDISON AND STEELE. £21 

dedicated to Montague, a second volume of " Musse Anglicanse," 
Latin poems by members of the university. The first volume 
appeared in 1692. Eight Latin poems of his own were in 
Addison's collection; one of them on "Machinse Gesticulan- 
tes, Anglice, a Puppet-Show, " another entitled " Sphseriste- 
rium." In the summer of 1699, Addison left Oxford for 
Paris, staid some weeks there, then lived for a year at Blois 
to learn French, and, among other studies, work at Latin 
authors, with especial reference to Latin geography, before he 
passed on into Italy. When he returned to Paris from Blois, 
Addison was introduced to Boileau, of whom he wrote to a 
correspondent: "He is old, and a little deaf, but talks incom- 
parably well in his own calling. He heartily hates an ill poet, 
and throws himself into a passion when he talks of any one 
that has not a high respect for Homer and Virgil." In Decem- 
ber, 1700, Addison left Marseilles for Genoa, in eompairy with 
Mr. Edward Wortley Montague. He spent a }*ear in Italy, and 
was at Geneva hy December, 1701, after what he called "a 
very troublesome journe}' over the Alps. My head is still giddy 
with mountains and precipices ; and yo\x can't imagine how 
much I am pleased with the sight of a plain." It was during 
this troublesome journe}' that Addison addressed to Charles 
Montague, then become Lord Halifax, his metrical " Letter 
from Italy," with its patriotic apostrophe to libert} T and British 
thunder. King Louis, he wrote, 

" strives in vain to conquer or divide 
Whom Nassau's arms defend and counsels guide." 

Addison was waiting at Geneva for a coming appointment 
as secretary for King William with the arnry in Italy under 
Prince Eugene, when he received news of the king's death 
on the 8th of March, 1702. With the life of the sovereign 
Addison's pension dropped ; his friends were out of office. 

Richard Steele did not seek advancement in life \>y the wa} r 
of patronage. Enthusiasm for the Revolution caused him to 
quit Oxford, and enlist as a private in the Duke of Ormond's 
regiment of Coldstream Guards. He said lightly afterwards 
that when he mounted a war-horse, with a great sword in his 
hand, and planted himself behind King William III. against 



522 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

Louis XIV., he lost the succession to a very good estate in the 
county of Wexford, in Ireland, from the same humor which he 
had preserved ever since, of preferring the state of his mind to 
that of his fortune. Lord Cutts, the colonel of the regiment, 
who was writer of verse as well as soldier, distinguished Steele, 
made him his secretary, got him an ensign's commission, and 
afterwards the rank of captain in Lord Lucas's regiment of 
Fusileers. While ensign in the Guards, Steele wrote "The 
Christian Hero," as he afterwards said, " with a design princi- 
pally to fix upon his mind a strong impression of virtue and 
religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity to unwarrantable 
pleasures." It was in four parts : — (1) Of the Heroism of the 
Ancient World ; (2) of the Bible Stoiy as a Link between Man 
and his Creator ; (3) of the Life a Christian should lead, as set 
forth by St. Paul ; (4) of the Common Motives of Human Ac- 
tion, best used and improved when blended with Religion. 
There was a closing eulogy of William III., as a great captain, 
and, still better, " a sincere and honest man." " The Christian 
Hero," dedicated to Lord Cutts, was published in 1701, and 
was so w T ell received, that hy 1711 it was in a fifth edition. 
Steele's next" work was a corned}', " The Funeral; or, Grief a 
la Mode," first acted in 1702. It was — with satire against 
undertakers and dishonesties of law — a comedy of a lord whose 
death was but a lethargj*, from which he recovered in the pres- 
ence of a trusty servant, who, for good reasons, persuaded him 
to wait a while, and watch unobserved what went on in the house 
of mourning. The wit of the comedy was free from profanity ; 
it was emphatically moral in its tone, and Steele's warmth of 
patriotic feeling also found expression in it. 

Joseph Addison, at the beginning of Queen Anne's reign, 
with his pension lost and college debts unpaid, had only the 
income of his fellowship. He was at Vienna in November, 
1702, where he showed to Montague's friend, George Stepney, 
then British Envoy at Vienna, what he had sketched of his 
"Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals," written 
after the model of Fontenelle's " Dialogues on the Plurality of 
Worlds." They were not published until after his death. 
Addison probably travelled as tutor, but in June, 1703, he was 



To A. D. 1750.] ADDISON AND STEELE. 523 

at Hamburg, and politely declined to be travelling tutor to the 
son of the Duke of Somerset for the insufficient pay of a hun- 
dred a year. About September, 1703, he had returned to 
London, and was lodged up three pair of stairs in the Hay- 
market. But his friend Richard Steele was again by his side, 
and was finishing his second comedy, ■' The Tender Husband ; " 
and Steele afterwards wrote : w I remember, when I finished ' The 
Tender Husband,' I told him there was nothing I so ardently 
wished as that we might some time or other publish a work 
written by us both, which should bear the name of the w Monu- 
ment, ' in memory of our friendship." In 1704, Steele's third 
comedy, " The Lying Lover," was produced, and failed, because 
his strong sense of responsibility as a writer would not allow 
him, while adapting the story, to treat lightly the romancing of 
the hero. Steele felt bound to uphold the sacredness of truth, 
and therefore opened his last act with the hero in Newgate. 
Thus he spoilt the coined}*. The Earl of Godolphin, who was 
Lord Treasurer, and a close friend of Marlborough's, and who 
was passing gradually from the Tories to the Whigs, having 
had the abilities and claims of Addison urged on him by Hali- 
fax during the rejoicings over Blenheim, gave him at once the 
post of a Commissioner of Appeals in the Excise, and asked 
him to write a poem on the battle. The result was Addison's 
'"Campaign," in the usual heroic couplets, a piece much 
praised, with especial admiration of the use made of a recent 
great storm for likening of Marlborough in battle to the angel, 

who, 

" pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform, 
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm." 

Addison followed up the success of this piece b}' publishing 
his " Remarks on Several Parts of Italy," with a dedication to 
Lord Somers. They chiefly treat travel in Italy as a way of 
illustrating passages from Latin poets. A copy of it Addison 
gave inscribed "to Dr. Jonathan Swift, the truest friend, and 
the greatest genius of his age." 

Addison, early in 1706, was appointed Uncler-Secretaiy of 
State to Sir Charles Hedges, a Tory, who was, before the end 
of the year, succeeded in office b}- Marlborough's son-in-law, 



524 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1700 

the Earl of Sunderland. Tn the next year Addison prod 
with music by Thomas Clayton, tk Rosamond," an opera that 
was to match the Italians with English genius. It only lived 
three nights, although Addison had chosen the subject to enable 
him to bring on the stage a compliment to Marlborough. 

Richard Steele was appointed Gazetteer, and the value of the 
office was presently raised for him from sixty to three hundred 
pounds a year. He was made also a gentleman-usher to the 
Prince Consort, with salary of a hundred a year. He had about 
this time an estate in Barbadoes, yielding over six hundred a 
year after payment of encumbrances upon it. Tins had been 
left him by a first wife, who died only a few months after mar- 
riage. In September, 1707, Steele was married to Miss Mary 
Scurlock. 

Addison, besides his public work, was acting in some way as 
friend and tutor to the ten-year-old son of the Dowager Count- 
ess of Warwick, the last Warwick of the family of Rich. At 
the end of 1708 the Earl of Sunderland was dismissed from 
his secretaryship, and Addison, his under- secretary, was trans- 
ferred to the office of chief secretary to the Earl of Wharton, 
just appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Addison was a 
member of the House of Commons many years, but was too 
nervous to speak in the House. He rose once, but. em- 
barrassed by his welcome, stammered and sat down. 

Addison had gone to Ireland as chief secretary to the Lend 
Lieutenant, when Steele issued the first number of the "Tafc- 
ler" on the 12th of April, 1709. Doubtless it had occurred 
to Steele, as a reader of Defoe's " Review," that its little 
supplement of advices from the Scandal Club, dealiug lightly 
with characteristics of the common daily life in comments 
and imaginary letters, represented a good form of service 
to society. Defoe said of this light matter, which some cen- 
sured him for blending with his discussion of great public 
questions, that many ik care but for a little reading at a time." 
and " thus we wheedle them in, if it may be allowed that ex- 
pression, to the knowledge of the world, who, rather than take 
more pains, would be content with their ignorance, and search 
into nothing." Upon this hint, or, at any rate, in this spirit. 



To A.D. 1750.J ADDISON AND STEELE. 525 

Steele acted when he planned and began the u Tatler," without 
taking his friend Addison into his councils. The ''Tatler," 
planned to give a little of its space to news, was a penny paper, 
published three times a week ; and it was not until eighty num- 
bers had appeared, and its success was complete, that Addison 
returned to London, became a contributor, and was drawn by 
Steele into a form of writing that brought all his powers into 
use. Steele closed the "Tatler" at No. 271, on the 2d of 
January, 1711, and it was re-issued in four volumes. 

On the 1st of March appeared the first number of its suc- 
cessor, the " Spectator," which excluded politics, and, like the 
"Tatler," was Steele's paper, but in which he had, from the 
first, Addison's co-operation. The " Spectator " was published 
dailj r , and its price was a penn}", until the 1st of August, 
1712, when a halfpenny stamp duty killed man}' journals. It 
reduced the sale of the " Spectator," which then had its price 
raised to twopence. Steele and Addison's " Spectator " ended 
at No. 555, Dec. 6, 1712. The other numbers, to 635 (June 
18 to Dec. 20, 1714), forming afterwards the eighth volume, 
represent Addison's unsuccessful attempt to revive it, about a 
year and a half after it had ceased to appear. Steele's hearty 
interest in men and women gave life to his essays. He ap- 
proached even literature on the side of human fellowship ; 
talked of plays with strong personal regard for the players ; 
and had, like Addison, depths of religious earnestness that 
gave a high aim to his work. He sought to turn the current 
of opinion against duelling. Some of his lightest papers were 
in accordance with his constant endeavor to correct the false 
tone of societ}' that made it fashionable to speak with contempt 
of marriage. No man labored more seriously to establish the 
true influence of woman in society. Addison's delicate humor, 
and fine critical perception, produced essays with another kind 
of charm. The Saturday papers in the " Spectator," which 
niairy would read on Sunday, were, as a rule, on subjects that 
would harmonize with thought on sacred subjects, and the 
series of eighteen papers in which Addison brought Milton into 
fashion, by his criticism of "Paradise Lost," begun on Sat- 
urday, Jan. 5, 1712, were the Spectators for the first eighteen 



52€ MAXUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

Saturdays of 1712. Eleven essays 011 the pleasures of Imagi- 
nation (Nos. 411- -421) were another important series of his. 
appearing every day. from June 21 to July 3, 1712. To the 
sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley and other members of the 

Spectator Club both friends contributed, but they owed most 
to the fine humor of Addison. 

In 1714. Steele sat as M.P. for Stockbridge, in Dorset. He 
put forth a pamphlet which is described by its long title : %i The 
Crisis : or. a Discourse Representing, from the most Authentick 
Records, the just Causes of the late Happy Revolution : and the 
several Settlements of the Crowns of England and Scotland on 
her Majesty : and on the Demise of her Majesty without Issue, 
upon the most Illustrious Princess Sophia. . . . "With some 
Seasonable Remarks on the Danger of a Popish Successor." 
The Queen, in her speech on opening Parliament, said. " There 
are some who are arrived to that height of malice as to insinuate 
that the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover is in 
danger under my Government." The Lords, mostly "Whigs, 
summoned before them the printer and publisher of ,k The Pub- 
lic Spirit of the TThigs." and committed them to the custody 
of the Black "Rod. Harley. Lord Oxford, had given Swift a 
hundred pounds for writing it. but now affected indignation at 
its tone. The House of Commons, mostly Tory, fell upon 
Steele as author of the • • Crisis ' ' and of a pamphlet called 
•• The Englishman." being the close (No. 57) of the paper so 
called. Steele defended himself well, but he was expelled the 
House on the 16th of March. 1714. by a majority of 245 against 
152. 

The accession of George I. brought the TThigs again into 
power. Steele was made surveyor of the royal stables at 
Hampton Court, and a deputy-lieutenant in the Commission of 
the Peace for Middlesex. Through the death of the sovereign, 
the license of the royal company at Drury Lane required re- 
newal. Steele was applied to : his name was. at their request. 
inserted in the patent as Governor of the Company, and. in 
kindly relation with the players, he began to receive an income 
of six hundred a year from the theatre. He was returned also 
to the first Parliament of George I., as member for Borough- 



To A.D. 1750.] ADDISON AND STEELE. 527 

bridge in Yorkshire; and in April, 1715, he was one of three 
deputy-lieutenants who were knighted upon going up to the 
king with an address. 

I11 this year Steele published a translation of an Italian book 
on " The State of Roman Catholic Religion throughout the 
World," with an ironical dedication to the Pope. At Drury 
Lane he produced his friend Addison's one comedy, " The 
Drummer," written some years before. It was not successful, 
and is noticeable chiefly as another illustration of the religious 
feeling that was a mainspring of the literary work of Steele and 
Addison. A mock ghost of a drummer brings out a lively 
dread of the supernatural from below the surface of a fop who 
sets up for an atheist. Though Addison had no success in 
corned}-, his famous tragedy of " Cato," first performed in 
1713, had great immediate popularity. 

Addison died in 1719, aged forty-seven; and his friend 
Steele survived him. 

For his opposition to the Peerage Bill, Steele's patent at 
Drury Lane was threatened by the Government, and he started 
a paper called the " Theatre," continued from Jan. 2 to April 5, 
1720, to protect his own interests and those of the stage. 
Steele's patent was revoked, whereby he was deprived of his 
six hundred pounds a }'ear, and three 3-ears' continuance of 
that income after his death. This act proceeded chiefly from 
the ill will of the Duke of Newcastle, *vho was Lord Chamber- 
lain. In May, 1721, Steele was restored to his office by the 
good will of Robert Walpole, then at the head of the Treasuiy ; 
and in the following 3*ear, 1722 — the } T ear of the death of his 
only son, Eugene — he produced, with very great success, his 
fourth and last corned}*, "The Conscious Lovers." This was 
founded upon Terence's "Andria," designed, Steele said in 
the preface, "to be an innocent performance," and written 
chiefly for the sake of a scene in the fourth Act, in which the 
younger Bevil so deals with a challenge from a friend as to 
enforce once more Steele's doctrine that Christian duty rises 
far above, and utterly condemns, the point of honor worshipped 
by the duellists. The old tenderness of Steele's love for Addi- 
son appeared also this year in a letter to Congreve, prefixed 



528 MAX UAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

to a new edition of Addison's comedy of "The Drummer." 
Steele began two more comedies, " The School of Action " and 
''The Gentleman," but his health failed. He withdrew from 
London to the West of England, and about 1726 settled on a 
mortgaged estate of his, at Llangunnor, near Carmarthen. 
There he was at home, with failing health and struck with 
palsy, at the end of the reign of George I. One who knew 
him. and received kindness from him in his last days, said of 
Steele, "I was told he retained his cheerful sweetness of 
temper to the last, and would often be carried out of a sum- 
mer's evening where the country lads and lasses were assembled 
at their rural sports, and with his pencil give an order on his 
agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer." Steele 
died on the 1st of September. 1729. having survived Addison 
about ten years. Steele had paid every creditor before his 
death, and his children were not left in want. He had been a 
tender husbaud. a good father, a devoted friend, was open and 
kindly, while imprudently generous in the fellowship of men ; 
and taking his place in literature with a high sense of responsi- 
bility, he was throughout a faithful servant of God and his 
country. 

8. One of those who. in 1705. published their poems on Blenheim, 
was John Philips, born December 30, 1676, at Bampton, in Oxfordshire, 
where his father. Dr. Stephen Philips, Archdeacon of Salop, was vicar. 
John Philips, of delicate constitution and great sweetness of character, 
was sent from home education to Winchester School, where he was ex- 
cused much roughness of school discipline, and often read Milton in 
play-hours. He had written imitations of Milton before he was sent, in 
1694, to Christchurch, Oxford. There his simple, modest cheerfulness, 
and his quick wit, surrounded him with friends. Milton still was his 
favorite study, and he knew Virgil almost by heart. He traced out 
Milton's imitations of the classics, and himself imitated the blank-verse 
of his master poet. He was destined for the profession of medicine, and 
delighted in natural science, but his weak health made him unfit for 
active duty. At college he wrote in playful mood, to suggest to a care- 
less friend the value of a shilling in the pocket, his " Splendid Shilling," 
a burlesque poem representing, in about a hundred and fifty lines, the 
commonest images in high-sounding Miltonic verse. In style as in sub- 
ject it was small coin glorified, perhaps the best piece of burlesque writ- 
ing in our literature. This was read in manuscript, praised, copied, 
printed without authority. It gave Philips a reputation for wit wben 



To A. D. 1750.] THOMAS TICKELL. 529 

he came to London, and he was hospitably received into the house of 
Henry St. John (afterwards Lord Bolingbroke), who was two years his 
junior. St. John had entered Parliament for Wootton Basset in 1701, 
and became one of the best speakers in support of Robert Harley. 
When Halifax and Lord Godolphin set Addison writing a poem upon 
Blenheim, their rivals, Harley and St. John, asked for a poem on the 
same theme from John Philips, and it appeared in 1705 as ''Blenheim: 
a Poem inscribed to the Right Honorable Robert Harley, Esq.," a strain 
of blank-verse, with echoes in it of the roll of Milton's music. In the 
same year appeared the authorized edition of " The Splendid Shilling: 
An Imitation of Milton. Now First Correctly Published." In 1706, 
John Philips published, also in blank-verse, at a time when the ortho- 
dox measure was "heroic" couplet, his carefully-written poem in two 
books, " Cider." This is a good example of a form of poem which in 
modern literature had its origin in Virgil's " Georgics," and which had 
been especially cultivated in Italy by Alamanni, Rucellai, Tansillo, and 
others; indeed, Philips's "Cider" was presently translated into Italian. 
John Philips was preparing to rise to a higher strain, and attempt a 
poem on "The Last Day," when his health entirely failed, and in 
February, 1708, he died of consumption in his mother's house, at Here- 
ford, when he was not yet thirty-three years old. 

9. Ambrose Philips, born in 1671, was seventeen years older than 
Pope. He was of a good Leicestershire family, and educated at St. 
John's College, Cambridge. He came to London, was a zealous Whig, 
and published, in 1700, "The Life of John Williams, Archbishop of 
York," celebrating him as an opponent of the policy of Laud. Ambrose 
Philips became, next to Steele, Addison's most familiar friend. In 
1709, when his "Pastorals" had been some time published, he was 
in Copenhagen, and wrote thence to the Earl of Dorset "A Winter 
Piece," much lauded by Addison in the "Spectator." Addison was 
over-zealous on his friend's behalf, and greatly magnified in the " Spec- 
tator" Philips's translation of Racine's " Andromaque," as "The Dis- 
trest Mother," acted in 1711. Pope's "Pastorals" were four, entitled 
"Spring," "Summer," "Autumn," "Winter," and their shepherds 
had names from the ancient classics. Ambrose Philips, in his six 
"Pastorals," included Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar" among his 
models, and had among his shepherds Lobbin, Thenot, Colinet, Cuddy, 
and Hobbinol. He died in 1749. 

10. Addison, having received from Oxford a poem in praise 
of his " Rosamond," sought out the author, and found him to 
be Thomas Tickell (b. 1686, d. 1740), son of a Cumberland 
clergy-man, and undergraduate of Queen's College, Oxford. 
Tickell thenceforth became Addison's friend and follower. In 
1710 he was chosen to a fellowship, which he continued to 



530 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.J>. 1700 

hold until liis marriage in 1726. Under Addison's patronage, he 

early took part in political affairs, and rose to be Under- v 
tary of State, and Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. 
He is most frequently mentioned now on account of the part he 
played, consciously and unconsciously, in disturbing the frien lly 
relations of Addison and Pope. In 1718. Tlckell wrote foi 
Steele's paper, the " Guardian." a series of live essays on 
pastoral poetry, which led op to a glorification of Addison's 
friend, Ambrose Philips : the last essay, on the 17th of April, 
ending with the dictum that Theocritus ■• left his : ::s to 

Virgil, Virgil left his to his son Spenser, and Spenser was suc- 
ceeded by his eldest-born. Philips." Of Pope's pastorals there 
was only implied condemnation. Pope resented this. and. as 
Tickell was Addison's retainer. Pope would rightly believe 
Addison privy to the slight thus put upon hhn Mi took 
prompt revenge cleverly in the "Guardian" for April 27 
(Xo. 40), with an essay professing to be one more of the 
series. This essay proceeded to compare Pope and Philips, 
and did so with ironical praise of all that Pope thought worst 
in Philips, and ironical condemnation of himself in com 
with Virgil. But a worse disturbance came afterwai Is. In 
1715. in the same week in which ap the first volume of 

Pope's translation of the ••Iliad." Tonson published, as a 
verse pamphlet. •■ The First Book of Homer's Iliad. T: fil- 
iated by Mr. Tickell." It had this notification: "To the 
Reader. I must inform the reader, that, when I began this 
First Book. I had some thoughts of translating the wh le 
fc Iliad : ' but had the pleasure of being diver: 1 that 

design by finding the work was fallen into a much abler hand. 
I would not. therefore, be thought to have any other view 
in publishing this small specimen of Homer's • Iliad." than 
to bespeak, if possible, the favour of the publick to a transla- 
tion of Homer's ' Odysseis." wherein I have already made some 
progress." In spite of this courteous note. Pope resented 
rivalry, ascribed it to Addison, who was supposed to have 
ished Tickell' s verse, and who took part in the inevitable draw- 
ing of comparisons. Of talk at Button'-, "lien the first volume 
of Pope's "Iliad" was new. Gay told Pope. " Mr. A". 



To A.D. 1750.] SUSANNA CENTLIVRE. 531 

says that your translation and Tickell's are both well done, but 
that the latter has more of Homer." Pope now expressed his 
anno}'ance in that satire which laj T s a bitter emphasis on the 
defects of Addison, 

" Who, if two wits on rival themes contest, 
Approves of each, but likes the worst the best," 

but not without generous recognition of his worth as one 

" Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
And born to write, converse, and live with ease." 

This piece of satire was first printed in 1723, then among 
Pope's " Miscellanies," in 1727, and finally incorporated in the 
Epistle to Arbuthnot, in 1735. Addison was so free from un- 
generous feeling in this matter, that he went veiy much out of 
his way, in the " Freeholder " for May 7, 1716, to say, that, as 
the illiterate could judge of "Virgil" from Diyden's transla- 
tion, " those parts of Homer which have already been published 
by Mr. Pope give us reason to think that the ' Iliad ' will ap- 
pear in English with as little disadvantage to that immortal 
poem." Among Tickell's original poems are "The Prospect 
of Peace," " The Royal Progress," " Kensington Garden," 
and "Oxford." 

11. Nicholas Rowe (b. 1673, d. 1718), son of a sergeant-at-law, was 
bred to the law, but, on the death of his father, turned to literature. 
He produced several plays — "The Ambitious Stepmother," in 1700; 
" Tamerlane." in 1702; " The Fair Penitent," in 1703; " The Biter," an 
unsuccessful comedy, in 1705; "Ulysses," in 1706; and, in 1708, "The 
Royal Convert;" afterwards, "Jane Shore" 1713, the best of his trage- 
dies; and "Lady Jane Gray," 1715. Rowe had a reverence for Shake- 
speare, and was the first editor of his works. After the four folio 
editions of Shakespeare's Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories, in 1623, 
1032, 1663, and 1685, came, in 1709-10, in seven volumes, "The Works 
of William Shakespeare; Revised and Corrected, with an Account of 
his Life and Writings, by Nicholas Rowe." Rowe's "Life of Shake- 
speare" preserves to us the traditions current in Rowe's time. Upon 
the death of Nahum Tate, m 1715, Nicholas Rowe succeeded him as 
poet-laureate, and held that office in the reign of George I., when he 
finished his translation of Lucan's " Pharsalia." 

12. Susanna Centlivre (b. about 1667, d. 1723) was the daughter of 
a Mr. Freeman, of Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, who was ruined by resist- 
ance to the Stuarts. She was married at sixteen to a husband who died 
in a twelvemonth, then to an officer, who, after eighteen months, was 



532 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

killed in a duel; then she supported herself by writing plays and by 
acting. As actress she fascinated Mr. Joseph Centlivre, the queen's 
head cook, who married and survived her. She wrote, between 1700 
and 1721, nineteen lively plays, with good plots and frequent expression 
of her political feeling as a hearty Whig. The most successful of her 
plays were "The Busy-Body" (1709), "The Wonder" (1713), and "A 
Bold Stroke for a Wife" (1718). 

13. John Hughes (b. 1677, d. 1720) was educated at a Dissenter's 
College in London; wrote a poem in 1697 on "The Triumph of Peace, 
occasioned 'by the Peace of Eyswick," and afterwards several odes, 
papers in the "Tatler" and in the "Spectator," translations from 
Fontenelle, and several plays. He had a situation in the Ordnance 
Office; was made afterwards, by Lord-Chancellor Cowper, Secretary to 
the Commissions of the Peace ; and died of consumption on the first 
night of his most successful play, "The Siege of Damascus." 

14. John Arbuthnot (b. about 1675, d. 1735) was the son 
of a Scotch Episcopal clergyman. The Revolution having 
deprived the father of church preferment, the son, M.D. of 
Aberdeen, came to London, and taught mathematics for a 
living. He obtained notice in 1G95, \>y " An Examination of 
Dr. Woodward's Account of the Deluge ; " was witty, learned, 
and a good talker, and was rising into medical practice. About 
1704, he chanced to be at Epsom when Prince George was in 
sudden need of medical attendance, was called in, treated him 
successfully, and became his regular physician. In 1709 he 
was made also Physician in Ordinary to the Queen, and Fellow 
of the College of Physicians. Already he was F.R.S., and a 
friend also of the wits and poets. In 1712 he wrote' one of the 
cleverest of English political satires, "Law is a Bottomless 
Pit; or, the Histoiy of John Bull," after the fashion of Swift's 
"Tale of a Tub," an allegory on the political disputes associ- 
ated with the French War to its close in the Treaty of Utrecht. 
In 1714 he amused himself with Pope, Swift, Ga}', Parnell, 
as members of a Scribbler's Club, and began with Pope and 
Swift a satire, after the manner of Cervantes, upon the abuse 
of human learning. They produced only Book I. of the 
"Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries 
of Martinus Scriblerus." On the death of Queen Anne, 
Arbuthnot was deprived of his post and of his official resi- 
dence at St. James's. 



To A.D. 1750.] COLLEY GIBBER. 533 

15. Thomas Parnell, born in Dublin in 1670, and M.A. of Trinity 
College there, took deacon's orders in 1700, and in 1705 was made Arch- 
deacon of Clogher. He married, was intimate with the wits of Queen 
Anne's time, and towards the end of her reign went over to the Tories. 
The queen's death destroyed his hope of advancement by the change. 
Parnell obtained a prebend through the influence of Swift, and in 1716 
was vicar of Finglass. He died in 1718, aged thirty-nine, and his 
friend Pope published, in 1722, a collected edition of his poems. The 
best of them was "The Hermit," modernized from an old moral tale. 

16. Lewis Theobald, son of an attorney, at Sittingbourne, 
in Kent, and bred to the law, published, in 1714, a translation 
of the " Electra " of Sophocles ; and produced in the following 
year an acted tragedy, the u Persian Princess," written before 
he was nineteen. His " Perfidious Brother," acted in 1716, was 
on the model of Otway's "Orphan." In 1715 he published 
translations of the " CEdipus " of Sophocles, and versions from 
Aristophanes of " Plutus " and "The Clouds." To these he 
had added opera and melodrama ; in 1 725 the pantomime of 
"Harlequin a Sorcerer;" and in 1726 a pamphlet, called 
"Shakespeare Restored; or, a Specimen of the mam' Errors 
committed as well as unamended by Mr. Pope in his late 
Edition of this Poet." Theobald understood Shakespeare 
better than Pope did, and lived to show it ; but this did not 
lessen the annoyance of his attack, and, fresh from the smart 
of it, Pope made Theobald the hero of his "Dunciad." In 
1727 Theobald gave work to the critics by producing at Drury 
Lane, as a play of Shakespeare's, "The Double Falsehood; 
or, the Distrest Lovers." He made good his claim to criticise 
Pope's " Shakespeare," by producing, in 1733, his own edition 
of Shakespeare, in seven volumes. The literary controversy 
had brought Shakespeare into notice. Pope had replied to 
Theobald's strictures in a second edition of his own " Shake- 
speare," in 1728 ; but Theobald's edition, in 1733, destroyed 
Pope's, and about thirteen thousand copies of it were sold. 
Theobald died in 1744. 

Colley Gibber (b. 1671, d. 1757) was the son of Caius 
Gabriel Cibber, a sculptor from Holstein, sculptor of the bass- 
relief on the Monument by which the fire of London was com- 
memorated. After education at Grantham Free School, Colle}' 



534 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

Gibber took to the stage within a year after the Revolution ; first 
giving his services as an actor for the privilege of seeing pla}~s, 
then rising gradually to twent} T shillings a week, and marrying 
upon that, with twent}' pounds a year from his father. His 
first play, " Love's Last Shift," had not much advanced him 
as an actor; but when Vanbrugh, in 1697, made his play of 
"The Relapse" a sequel to Gibber's first play, he secured 
Gibber as actor of its leading part, Sir Novelty Fashion, newly 
created Lord Foppington. From this time to the end of his 
long life, Gibber stood at the head of English comedians in 
that period. Among his next plays were "The Careless 
Husband " and " The Nonjuror." He continued to write new 
plays and to alter old ones, and became distinguished as one of 
the liveliest men of his age. In 1730 he became poet-laureate, 
and retired from the stage. Having offended Pope, he was 
most absurdly made the hero of the " Dunciad " in its second 
form ; and when more than seventy years old, he had, in an 
"Apology for his Life," published in 1740, referred to Pope's 
hostility, of which the source la}' deeper than he understood. 
He took his place in the "Dunciad" good-humoredry ; pub- 
lished " A Letter to Mr. Pope, Inquiring into the Motives that 
might Induce him in his Satirical Works to be so Frequently 
Fond of Mr. Cibber's Name;" and then "Another Occa- 
sional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, wherein the New 
Hero's Preferment to his Throne in the ' Dunciad ' seems not 
to be accepted, and the Author of that Poem his more Rightful 
Claim to it asserted ; with an Expostulatoiy Address to the 

Rev. Mr. W. W n, Author of the New Preface, and 

Adviser in the Curious Improvements in that Satire." Though 
Colley Cibber had given up acting, he occasionally played 
fops and feeble old men for fifty pounds a night. In 1 745 he 
pla3'ed, at the age of sevent3'-four, Pandulph, in his own 
version of Shakespeare's " King John" as "Papal T}Tanny." 
17. John Gay was of Pope's age, born near Barnstaple, in 
1688, and educated in that town before he was sent to London 
as apprentice to a silk-mercer. In 1712 he passed from behind 
the counter into the service of the Duchess of Monmouth, as 
her secretar}' ; and in 1713 he published his first poem, " Rural 



ToA.D. 1750.] ALEXANDER POPE. 585 

Sports," a Georgic, with a dedication to Pope. Thenceforth 
Pope and Gay were friends ; and to his new friend, who had 
begun his career in verse with rural themes, Pope, with Tickell's 
trumpeting of Ambrose Philips fresh in his ears, suggested the 
writing of a set of pastorals that should caricature Philips' s 
lauded rusticity. This was the origin of Gay's six pastorals 
called "The Shepherd's Week," published in 1714, with a 
proem in prose to the reader, and a prologue in verse to Boling- 
broke. But though the proem burlesqued Philips, and the 
purpose of censure and caricature was evident enough, yet 
simple speech is better than the false classicism that condemned 
it ; and Gay, being much more of a poet than Ambrose Philips, 
and in himself, as Pope said, "a natural man, without design, 
who spoke what he thought," "The Shepherd's Week" made 
its own mark as pastoral poetr}', and, in spite of its Cloddipole 
and Hobnelia, by its own merit went far to disprove its case. 
At the end of Queen Anne's reign Gay went to the court of 
Hanover, as secretary to the Earl of Clarendon. He made the 
great success of his life just after the accession of George II. 
with " The Beggar's Opera." The publication of his " Poems " 
in two volumes by subscription in 1720 had produced him a 
thousand pounds. In 1726 he published his u Fables," with a 
dedication to the Duke of Cumberland, for whom they professed 
to be written. In Januar}', 1728, his "Beggar's Opera," 
written on Swift's suggestion, with Newgate characters to 
caricature Italian opera, was produced with wonderful success. 
Gay was a bright, natural poet. Captain Macheath, Poll}', and 
Lucy were for the public a welcome escape from the conven- 
tional, and Gay's profits from his author's rights came to seven 
hundred pounds. The Court considered itself satirized. The 
Archbishop of Canterbury thought that robbery was recom- 
mended. The performance of a sequel, "Poll}'," was there- 
fore interdicted. But Gay got all the more from his bookseller 
for the publishing of "Polly," and the Duke and Duchess of 
Queensbeny took care of him until his death in 1732, when he 
left six thousand pounds to his sisters. 

18. Alexander Pope was born in Lombard Street, May 
21 or 22, 1688, He was the only child of Roman Catholic 



536 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

parents. His father was a linen-draper, who retired from busi- 
ness about the time of his son's birth, and presently went to 
live at Binfielcl, about nine miles from Windsor, on the border 
of the forest. Sickly and frail from birth, Pope got instruction 
at home from a family priest named Banister, was sent for a 
short time to school at Twyford, then to London, where he con- 
trived to see Diyden, who had interest for him both as poet and 
as Roman Catholic. Pope, still a boy, went home to Binfield, 
studied in his own way, and tried his skill in verse upon trans- 
lations and imitations of Latin and English poets — some of 
them done, he said, at fourteen or fifteen years old. The 
popularity of Dryden's " Fables " also caused him to try, in 
Dryden's manner, adaptations of Chaucer. At the age of 
sixteen, in 1704, Pope wrote his " Pastorals ; " but as they 
were not printed until he was twent}^-one, they had, of course, 
the benefit of later revision. This was the case w r ith all juve- 
nile wwk of the poet, who wrote of himself ("Epistle to 
Arbuthnot") : 

" As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." 

Pope first appeared as a poet at the age of twenty-one, in 
Tonson's "Poetical Miscellanies," of which the series had 
been begun by Diyden, and a former volume had contained 
the first published writing of Addison. The sixth part, issued 
in 1709, opened with the "Pastorals " of Ambrose Philips, and 
closed with " Pastorals " by Mr. Alexander Pope. It contained, 
also, Pope's " January and May," from Chaucer's " Merchant's 
Tale," and Pope's " Episode of Sarpedon," translated from the 
Twelfth and Sixteenth Books of Homer's Iliad, with two poems 
in praise of Pope's " Pastorals," one of them by Wycherle}'. 

In the "Spectator" for Ma} r 15, 1711, appeared the adver- 
tisement, "This da}- is published 'An Essa}- on Criticism. ' 
Printed for W. Lewis, in Russell Street, Covent Garden." 
Lewis was a Roman Catholic bookseller. Published in 1711, 
the "Essay" had been written as early as in 1709. It was 
writing about w r riting, in the fashion of the day. Young Pope 
was following the lead of Boileau. But the "Essay on 
Criticism," though suggested by " L'Art Poetique," was the 



To A. D. 1750.] ALEXANDER POPE. 537 

work of a fresh mind, with native vigor of its own ; and Pope 
surpassed all preceding attempts to write couplets that packed 
thought, with brilliant effect of antithesis and shrewd aptness 
of word, within the compass of a line or couplet. Almost every 
truth is associated, in a thoughtful mind, with considerations 
modifying an}' one abrupt expression of it ; therefore, whoever 
seeks to express thought \>y a succession of bright flashes of 
speech must frequently say more or less than he means. For 
many of us, even now, the unaffected style of a true thinker is 
like the daylight that we work in and don't sta} T to praise. 
Yet Pope, while perfecting an artificial style, was in his own 
way. very much in earnest. In his "Essay on Criticism," 
while he followed the lead of Boileau in setting up for models 
the Latin writers of the Augustan time as the true artists who 
formed their st}de on nature, he dwells more than Boileau 
dwells on the fact that nature is " at once the source, and end, 
and test of art." The spirit of the "Essa} T on Criticism " is, 
as a whole, thoroughly generous. Pope saw no critic in 

" The bookful blockhead ignorantly read, 
With loads of learned lumber in his head." 

He knew the weak side of the legislation upon literature that 
had its source in Paris, for critic-learning flourished most in 
France : 

" The Rules a nation born to serve obeys; 
And Boileau still, in right of Horace, sways." 

In Pope's ideal critic, 

" Good-nature and good-sense must ever join: 
To err is human; to forgive, divine." 

There was no ill-nature in the poem, unless it were ill-nature 
to pair in a line Blackmore and Melbourne for their attacks on 
Dryden, and laugh at Dennis, who, with real merit, rather too 
much assumed the god, and was, in politics, intolerant of that 
which was to Pope most sacred. The wise, he said, can bear 
to be told their faults : 

" But Appius reddens at each word you speak, 
And stares, tremendous, with a threat' ning eye, 
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry." 



538 MANUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

John Dennis had produced a play of " Appius and Virginia." 
His stare was a characteristic. "He starts, stares, and looks 
round him at every jerk of his person forward," said Steele; 
and he had an affection in his writing for the word "tre- 
mendous," that became a joke against him. Pope contrib- 
uted to the "Spectator" for May 14, 1712 (No. 378), his 
"Messiah: a Sacred Eclogue, in Imitation of Virgil's ' Pol- 
lio.' " The fourth eclogue of Virgil, predicting the birth of a 
wonderful boy while Pollio is consul, and said b}' Virgil to have 
been founded on Sibjdline verses, has a parallelism with parts 
of Isaiah, which Pope therefore formed into a Virgilian eclogue. 
The artificial gardening of the time had its match in the or- 
namental cultivation of the fields of poetry. But there is 
elevation in Pope's " Messiah," though it does write " dew\' 
nectar " where Isaiah had written " righteousness," and refine 
sheep into the " fieec}- care." Pope contributed also to the 
"Spectator" of Nov. 4, 1712, a short letter with some lines 
on " Cephalus and Procris," and another letter upon the Em- 
peror Adrian's lines beginning, " Animula, vagula, blandula," 
to the " Spectator " of Nov. 10. Out of this correspondence 
came, b} r Steele's suggestion, Pope's poem called " The Dj'ing 
Christian to his Soul." 

In 1712, Bernard Lintot, the publisher, imitated Tonson 03' 
producing a A^olumc of " Miscellaneous Poems and Transla- 
tions." Pope ma}- have been its editor. It contained transla- 
tions of his from Statius and Ovid, with smaller original pieces, 
and " The Rape of the Lock " in its first form, in two books. 
" The Rape of the Lock " arose out of a suggestion made to 
Pope by his friend, Mr. Caryll, that a family quarrel arising out 
of the liberty taken by Lord Petre, aged twenty, in cutting off 
a lock of the hair of Miss Arabella Fermor, daughter of Mr. 
Fermor, of Tusmore, might be made the subject of a plaj-ful 
poem that perhaps would restore peace. The result was an airy 
satire on the vanities of fashionable life, which Pope thought he 
could enlarge into mock-heroic \>y providing an epic machinery, 
lively and slight enough to be in harmony with its design. The 
reading of a French story, " Le Comte de Gabalis," by the 
Abbe Villars, which talked about Rosi crucians, and four kinds 



To A.D. 1750.] ALEXANDER POPE. 539 

of spirits of the four elements, — sj r lphs, gnomes, n}Tnphs, and 
salamanders, — suggested to him what he called a Rosi crucian 
machinery of sylphs in place of the interposition of heathen 
gods and goddesses. Addison told Pope that his poem, as it 
stood in Lintot's " Miscellany " in 1712, was " merum sal," a 
delicious little thing, that he would not be likely to improve ; 
and Pope, then irritable towards Addison, ascribed honest and 
natural advice to a mean motive. In 1714 Pope reproduced 
" The Rape of the Lock," as " an Heroi-Comical Poem in Five 
Cantos," separately published. Lintot paid seven pounds for 
the original two cantos, and fifteen pounds for the enlarged 
poem. Success was immediate. The poem went through 
three editions in the }~ear. In some sense inspired b}~ Boileau's 
"Lutrin," as the "Essay on Criticism" was inspired by 
" L'Art Poetique," "The Rape of the Lock" was a poem 
that surpassed all former writing of the kind. The fairy 
machinery was handled daintily ; the style suited the theme. 
As in the '• Essay on Criticism," there was a predominant 
good humor ; and substance was given to the work b} T under- 
lying English seriousness, that makes the whole a lesson summed 
up by Clarissa's speech, in the fifth canto, which has for its 
closing lines : 

" good humor can prevail 

"When airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail. 

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll ; 

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul." 

There is more than idling in such lines as those which repre- 
sent the lady's toilet-table as an altar, the toilet itself as a reli- 
gious rite ; and place the lady's Bibles by her looking-glass, 
among putfs, powders, patches, and billets-doux. 

Pope's literary life falls into three periods, corresponding to 
three reigns. Under Queen Anne he produced his own earlier 
poetry ; under George I. he was translator of Homer, and edit- 
or of Shakespeare ; and the later period of his own verse falls 
under the reign of George II. After publishing, at the begin- 
ning of 1715, his version of Chaucer's "Temple of Fame," 
Bernard Lintot published, in June the same }'ear, the first 
of the six volumes of Pope's " Iliad," containing four books 



540 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

with prefatory matter. ' A volume of the " Iliad " appeared 
annually after the first in 1715, until there was a pause in 1719, 
and in 1720 the work was completed by the issue of the fifth 
and sixth volumes. Pope was paid two hundred pounds a 
volume b}' his publishers, and six hundred and sixty copies to 
supply subscribers. Pope's friend, Parnell, wrote the Life of 
Homer, Broome and others found material for notes ; but Pope, 
after deducting payment for aid, must have received at least 
five thousand pounds for his translation of the u Iliad." All 
his original work in Queen Anne's reign had not brought him 
a hundred pounds, and Dryden had not obtained more than 
twelve hundred pounds for his translation of Virgil. Pope 
next undertook to supply Tonson with an annotated edition of 
Shakespeare, and Lintot with a translation of the " Odyssey." 
For each there was to be a subscription-list. In the proposals 
for a translation of the " Odyssej'," Pope said he had under- 
taken it, but that the subscription was also for two friends who 
would assist him in his work. These were Broome and Fenton. 

William Broome had been educated at Eton as a foundation scholar, 
and at Cambridge by the subscription of friends, and was Vicar of Stur- 
ston in Suffolk. f He had a turn for verse, and, with repute as a Greek 
scholar, had begun his literary life by taking part in a prose translation 
of the "Iliad." Introduced to Pope at Sir John Cotton's, in Cam- 
bridgeshire, Broome pleased the poet, and was employed in selecting 
extracts for notes to the "Iliad." Upon the "Odyssey" Broome was 
a chief helper. He translated eight books, — the second, sixth, eighth, 
eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-third, and compiled 
all the notes. The eleventh and twelfth books he had translated some 
years before, for his diversion. While the "Odyssey" translation was 
in progress, Broome wrote of Pope to Fenton, " he turns every thing he 
touches into gold." When it was ended, he obliged Pope by appending 
a note, in which he claimed for himself the translation of only three 
books, and for Fenton only two ; with expectation that the rest of their 
work was to be praised as Pope's by the public, and its glory then claimed 
for the authors. But Broome's relation to Pope ended in just discon- 
tent; and, with a sense of fraud upon his reputation, he wrote of Pope 
to Fenton as a King of Parnassus, who held "all its gold and silver 
mines as privileges of his supremacy, and left coarser metals to the 
owners of the soil." Broome published a volume of Miscellaneous 
Poems in 1727, married a rich widow, and became LL.D. at the begin- 
ning of the reign of George II. He had several good preferments, 
and died in 1745. Elijah Fenton, who, after a Cambridge education. 



To A.D. 1750.] ALEXANDER POPE. 541 

had been usher of a school in Surrey, afterwards master of the school 
at Sevenoaks; secretary to Lord Orrery, and tutor to his son, Lord 
Boyle; had published verse in 1709 and 1717; and in 1723, while at work 
for Pope, produced a tragedy, "Mariaume." He also edited Waller, 
and wrote a Life of Milton. Fenton, as fellow-worker on the " Odyssey," 
translated four books, — the first, fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth. 
Pope translated only twelve books, and his knack of translating Homer 
was so easily caught, that, when he had touched over the work of his 
assistants, few readers could observe in the "Odyssey" a difference 
between the books translated by him and those done by his colleagues, 
Broome and Fenton. Pope's reputation made the profit of the undertak- 
ing; and his share of the earnings by the " Odyssey," published in 1725- 
26, was thirty-five huudred pounds, after paying Broome five hundred 
pounds for the eight books and a hundred pounds for the notes, and 
Fenton three hundred pounds. Thus Pope earned eight or nine thou- 
sand pounds in the reigu of George I. by that work of his life which is 
least valuable to posterity. But it was the age of French classicism, 
when Homer and Virgil were the names to conjure by. 

During the }~ears in which Pope was engaged on Homer, 
many changes took place in his domestic life. In 1715 the 
family removed to Twickenham, where Pope took a long lease 
of a house, with five acres of ground, — the house thenceforth 
known as Pope's Villa. An underground passage connecting 
the land on opposite sides of the public road, Pope, otherwise 
careful of money, spent much in transforming into an orna- 
mental grotto. His father died in 1717 ; and he lived with his 
mother, to whom he was a devoted son, upon his small patri- 
mony, increased substantially by the profits of translating 
Homer. 

In 1715 Colury Cibber produced his "Non-juror," aversion 
of Moliere's " Tartuffe," directed against the Eoman Catholics 
and Nonjurors who had sympathized with the Jacobite insur- 
rection of that 3-ear. It had a great success, and its loyalty 
marked Cibber for the post of poet-laureate, to which he 
succeeded on the death of the Eev. Laurence Eusclen, in 
1730. But its bitterness towards those who were of the faith 
of Pope's household stirred Pope's resentment against Cibber, 
and marked him for the post to which he was afterwards pro- 
moted in "The Dunciad." Pope expressed his feeling at 
once in a satirical " Key to the Nonjuror," with a touch in it 
of serious indignation. This trifle was suggested by his former 



542 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

" Key to the Lock," published in 1715, when he expounded the 
piece as a political allegory, the Lock being the Barrier Treaty, 
Belinda Queen Anne, and so forth. Cibber himself ascribed 
Pope's dislike of him to resentment of a piece of personal im- 
pertinence, introduced by Cibber as actor of the character of 
Bayes in the " Rehearsal." 

In 1725 Pope's "Edition of Shakespeare" appeared, in six 
volumes. Only seven hundred and fifty copies were printed, 
and of these a hundred and fortj- remained unsold, until their 
price was much reduced. Shakespeare was not then a name 
to conjure with, and Pope received little more than two hun- 
dred pounds for his work upon him. But he brought Shake- 
speare into notice at a time when a writer on the Laws of 
Poetry said, in 1721: "To go through all the soliloquies of 
Shakespeare would be to make a volume on this single head. 
But this I can say in general, that there is not one in all his 
works that can be excused by reason or nature." 

When Swift brought "Gulliver" to town, and was with 
Pope and Gay at Twickenham, in 1726, they, with aid from 
Arbuthnot, began to collect many pieces, chiefly of Swift's, 
into four volumes of "Miscellanies," of which the first two 
appeared in 1727. Among Pope's contributions were a satire 
on Burnet's "History of His Own Time," called "Memoirs 
of P. P., Clerk of this Parish," and "On Bathos; or, of 
the Art of Sinking in Poetiy," in which Pope dealt satirically 
with many of the minor poets of the daj T , and did not spare his 
dissatisfied colleague, William Broome. The next step from 
this was to " The Dunciad." 

As first published in three books in Maj*, 1728, " The Dun- 
ciad " had Lewis Theobald for its hero. In the first book, the 
goddess of Dulness chose Theobald to be Settle's successor, 
and carry diversions of the rabble from Smithfielcl to the polite 
West. In the second book, poets, critics, and booksellers con- 
tended in games to honor the new king. In the third book, the 
new king, sleeping on the lap of Dulness, was transported in a 
vision to the banks of Lethe, where Settle's ghost, having dis- 
coursed to him of the glories of Dulness past and present, 
prophesied the triumph of her empire in the future. In April, 



To A.D. 1750.] ALEXANDER POPE. 543 

1729, "The Dunciad " appeared with "Notes Variorum and 
the Prolegomena of Scriblerus," to which Swift and Arbuthnot 
had contributed. There was, of course, much outer}' ; and in 
January, 1730, a " Grub Street Journal " was established, which 
appeared weekly unto the end of 1737, Pope contributing. It 
professed to be written by certain Knights of the Bathos, who, 
under guise of attack on Pope, fought his battle, and really 
attacked his adversaries. In March, 1741, Pope published 
" The New Dunciad, as it was Found in the Year 1741," with 
the original three books modified, a fourth book added, and 
Colley Cibber, who had been since 1730 poet-laureate, repla- 
cing Theobald as hero. 

To return to Pope's occupations after the publication of" The 
Dunciad " in its first form, he wrote, in 1731, his " Epistle on 
Taste," including a supposed satire on the false luxury of the 
Duke of Chandos at Cannons. In August of that year he had 
finished three books of his "Essay on Man." In 1732 ap- 
peared his epistle to Lord Bathurst, " Of the Use of Riches," 
including his famous character of the Man of Ross, and his 
moralizing on the death-bed of George Villiers, Duke of Buck- 
ingham. In the same year he published, as an experiment, 
the first part of his " Essay on Man," containing the first 
two epistles inscribed to Bolingbroke as Laelius. There was 
no author's name, and for a little while nobody — not even 
Swift — supposed this to be Pope's work. In 1733 Pope pub- 
lished the third epistle of " The Essa}^ on Man," and an imita- 
tion of Horace (Satire 1 of Book II.) in dialogue between Pope 
and his friend Fortescue, a law} T er in good practice, soon after- 
wards a Baron of the Exchequer. To the same year belonged 
"The Moral Essaj^s, Characters of Men." In the summer of 
this year Pope lost his mother, so long a witness to the suc- 
cesses of the son who cheered her with unfailing love. In 

1734 appeared the fourth epistle of " The Essa3 T on Man." In 
the same year, Pope published "The Epistle to Dr. Arbuth- 
not," in which he defended himself against aspersion. In 

1735 appeared " Of the Characters of Women ; " in 1737 four 
of the "Imitations of Horace;" and in 1738 the "Universal 
Hymn," closing "The Essay on Man," and the satirical dia- 



544 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

logues, " One thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight," which 
afterwards formed the epilogue to the satires. Pope's ethical 
writings in the reign of George II. indicate not only the 
thoughtfulness of advancing years, but in some degree also new 
tendencies of thought in Europe. Even' through the small pique 
and personal bitterness of "The Dunciad " there flowed a 
deeper current, that did work of its time in scouring out the 
channel through which better literature was to flow than that of 
the small critics and weak poets who claimed to represent the 
" understanding age." 

u The Essay on Man," an argument for God's goodness, as 
Father of all mankind, excited warm controversy. It was and 
is ascribed to the influence of Bolingbroke. Its doctrines really 
came from Leibnitz's " Theodicee," in which, the author having 
spoken in his preface of forms and ceremonies as only the 
shadows of the truth, he argued that naked truth would easily 
bring faith into accord with reason. But w^e are in love, he 
said, with superficial subtleties. Leibnitz held by the continu- 
ity of nature, and sought to blend the truths of different schools 
of philosoplry. 

Pope, following Leibnitz, argued in his " Essay on Man," that, 
Man being only part of the great universe, linked to it by nice 
dependencies and just gradations, which he cannot understand 
until he see the whole plan of creation, we must have faith, 
while we see but in a glass darkly, that "our proper bliss de- 
pends on what we blame ; " must know that there is in discord 
harmony not understood, in partial evil universal good. He 
argued that God's goodness may be found in passions and 
imperfections of the individual man. On self-love social love 
is built, and self-love, pushed from social to divine, " gives thee 
to make thy neighbour's blessing thine." He argued that God 
for man in society " on mutual wants built mutual happiness," 
and traced from the state of nature the development of govern- 
ment. Here there was abnegation of the old faith of his 
part} T in the divine right of kings, " For Nature knew no Right 
Divine in men." Advance of thought was indicated when from 
Pope the question came : 

" Who first taught souls enslaved, and realms undone, 
Th' enormous faith of many made for one ? " 



To A.D. 1750.] ALEXANDER POPE. 545 

Thus, while injuring the expression of his mind b} T the constant 
labor for a brilliant antithesis not reconcilable with full sin- 
cerity of style, Pope wrote his " Essa} T on Man" in the spirit 
of his lines : 

" In Faith and Hope the world will disagree, 
But all mankind's concern is Charity: 
AH must be false that thwart this one great end; 
And all of God that bless mankind, or mend." 

Plis fourth epistle on the source of happiness placed it in virtue 
alone, and in the sjinpathies of life : 

"Abstract what others feel, what others think, 
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink; " 

placed it in love of God and love of man, open to each who can 
but think or feel : 

" Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, 
But looks through Nature up to Nature's God; 
Pursues that chain which links th' immense design, 
Joins heav'n and earth, and mortal and divine; 
Sees that no being any bliss can know, 
But touches some above, and some below ; 
Learns, from this union of the rising whole, 
The first, last purpose of the human soul ; 
And knows where faith, law, morals, all began, 
All end, in love of God, and love of man." 

Whatever we may think of the sufficiency of Pope's doctrine, 
it was assuredby not irreligious in design or temper. Our best 
poet even of a corrupt and artificial age did what he could to 
meet the scepticism it produced. In Milton's day it had been 
the aim of the great poet to "justify the wa}~s of God to man," 
by answering doubts of His goodness that touched doctrines of 
the national religion. A bolder spirit of doubt now asked 
whether the daily experience of life was consistent with man's 
faith in an All-wise and Almighty Ruler. Therefore, even 
adapting Milton's line, Pope, to the best of his own lower 
power, sought to meet this doubt, and " vindicate the ways of 
God to man." • It is easy to misunderstand, away from its con- 
text, the formula twice repeated in the fourth epistle, " What- 
ever is is right;" but Pope meant only what Milton meant 
when he wrote : 



546 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

" All is best, though oft we doubt 
What the unsearchable dispose 
Of highest Wisdom brings about, 
And ever best found in the close." 

Pope died in 1744, having done nothing important in literature 
after the publication of the fourth book of ' ' The Dunciad ' ' in 
1742. 

19. Matthew Green was born in 1696, and died in 1737; held a 
position in the Custom House ; and was distinguished as a poet and wit. 
He wrote "The Grotto," and other poems; but his most noted produc- 
tion is "The Spleen," whose cheerful, thoughtful octosyllabics dealt 
with remedy for the depression of spirits which was said to have its 
source in the spleen. 

20. Allan Ramsay, born in 1C86, at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, was 
the son of a poor worker in Lord Hopetoun's lead-mines. He worked 
there himself as a child, washing ore. Then he was sent to Edinburgh, 
apprenticed to a wigmaker, and worked at that trade some years. But 
he delighted in old songs and ballads of his country, and could sing 
himself. His interest in literature made him a bookseller; and his 
cheery nature, his gift of verse and innocent pride in it, made his shop 
popular. In 1721 he published, by subscription, a volume of "Poems," 
partly in his native dialect, and, in 1724, "The Evergreen: Scots Poems 
wrote by the Ingenious before 1600." These were mostly taken from 
George Bannatyne's MS., and included pieces by Henryson, Dunbar, 
Kennedy, Lindsay, and the true old ballad of "Johnnie Armstrong," 
never before printed. It was one of the first signs in our literature of 
the coming revival of nationality, and it began among the people, for 
correction of false classicism. In the same year followed Allan Eamsay's 
" Tea-Table Miscellany," and in 1725 "The Gentle Shepherd," of which 
the first sketch, only a short dialogue, had already appeared in 1720 as 
"Patie and Eoger: a Pastoral by Mr. Allan Ramsay, in the Scots Dia- 
lect; to which is added an Imitation of the Scotch Pastoral, by Josiah 
Burchett." Ramsay's admirer, Mr. Burchett, was secretary of the 
Admiralty. Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" is a pastoral play in 
five acts, with rustic humor and rustic sentiment breaking often into 
delightful lyric forms. Duplicate dialogue was provided in the lyric 
parts, lest any performer should be unable to sing; for the "Gentle 
Shepherd " has, from Ramsay's time to this day, been accepted by Scottish 
peasantry as a play of their own, and may even yet be seen acted by 
them in barns on holiday occasions. The true and homely sense of life 
is in the piece, although its author was not yet so free from the literary 
influences of the time as to venture on a Patie for his hero who was 
not to turn out well-born at the end. Therefore he is a " gentle " shep- 
herd, that is, a shepherd in appearance, but really the son of a Sir 



To A.D. 1750.] JAMES THOMSON. 547 

William Worthy; and his Peggy also proves to have been born a lady. 
But Allan Ramsay's homebred poetry is so simple and true that it is 
little damaged by contact with his more formal strains, and by his sur- 
face adoptions of the taste of a polite world that helped him to keep 
house in comfort. He wrote occasional verses for rich friends, and 
loved the poets. He sang praises of Pope's Iliad; wrote a Scottish ode 
to Gay; a pastoral, "Sandie and Richie," on the death of Addison; 
another on the death of Prior; lamented, inverse, Newton's death in 
1727. For Allan Ramsay had broad sympathies, looked upon himself 
also as a man of genius, and spoke with a free, musical and hearty 
voice. He died in 1758. 

21. In Roxburghshire there was born, in September, 1700, 
another poet, who was harbinger of a new time. James 
Thomson, eldest son of the minister at Ed nam, and educated 
at Jedburgh, became, in 1719, student of Divinit}' at Edin- 
burgh, where he had David Mallet among his fellow-students ; 
and, in 1720, contributed to "The Edinburgh Miscellany" an 
essay "On a Country Life, by a Student of the University." 
In March, 1725, Thomson, aged twent}*-five, embarked at 
Leith for London. He arrived almost without money ; what 
was to have been sent to him could not be sent. His letters 
of introduction, wrapped in a handkerchief, were stolen from 
him, and presently he received news of the death of his mother. 
In Jul}' he was at East Barnet, teaching the five-3-ear-old son 
of Lord Binning to read, and writing his "Winter." He be- 
came introduced to Pope, Arbuthnot, and Ga}*, and his " Win- 
ter," the first published section of his " Seasons," appeared 
in March, 1726. Its author went to be tutor to a young gentle- 
man in an academy in Little Tower Street ; but ' ' Winter ' ' was 
soon in a second edition, and opened a better career to the 
poet. "Summer" appeared in 1727, and the other seasons 
followed in the beginning of the reign of George II. There is 
more of the artificial and rhetorical in Thomson's poetry with 
its triple adjectives than we should now associate with a true 
sense of nature. His English is very Latin, but his words are 
apt, and he paints with a minute truth of detail. Until French 
classicism was overthrown, } r oung poets who were growing into 
a new sense of beauty found a quickening influence in Thom- 
son's " Seasons." Even Burns drew, in his youth, inspiration 



54 8 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. A. D. 1700 

from the book which came out in the claj^s of Swift's " Gulli- 
ver " and Pope's "Dunciad," alone of its kind with one re- 
markable exception. 

In 1729 he gave to the stage his first tragedy, " Sophonisba," 
which had but moderate success in acting, though it went through 
four editions in 1730, when his " Seasons" first appeared in a 
complete edition, with "Autumn" and the closing " Hymn " 
of praise from all the works of Nature : 

"These as they change, Almighty Father, these 
Are but the varied God. The rolling year 
Is full of Thee." 

In 1730 and 1731 Thomson travelled in France and Italy 
with a young gentleman, Charles Richard Talbot, who soon 
afterwards died, and to whose memory he inscribed his poem 
on "Libert}*." Part I. of "Liberty" the poet published in 
December, 1734, when his pupil's father had become Lord 
Chancellor, and gave Thomson the office of Secretary of Briefs 
in the Court of Chancery. Parts II. and III. appeared in 
1735, Parts IV. and V. in 1736. The poem deserved, per- 
haps, more credit than it received ; but " Libei\v " was no fresh 
topic, while a real sense of the charm of natural objects, almost 
gone out of our literature, had been revived in ; - The Seasons." 
Lord Chancellor Talbot's death, in 1737, caused Thomson to 
write a poem honoring his memory. He now lost his office as 
Secretary of Briefs. In 1738 another play of Thomson's, 
"Agamemnon," was acted without success. In 1739 the act- 
ing of his play of "Edward and Eleonora " was prohibited, 
because it took part, in marked political allusions, with the 
Prince of Wales against the king. His love of libeily caused 
Thomson to write a preface, in 1740, to a new edition of Mil- 
ton's " Areopagitica ; " he wrote also in that year, with Mallet, 
the masque of " Alfred," which contains the now national song 
of " Rule Britannia." In 1744 Thomson received the sinecure 
office of Surve} T or-General of the Leeward Islands, worth three 
hundred pounds a }*ear. In 1745 his most successful play, 
" Tancred and Sigismunda," was acted at Drury Lane. In 
1747 he visited Shenstone at the Leasowes, and afterwards 



To A.D. 1750.] WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 549 

worked at a poem begun 3-ears before, " The Castle of Indo- 
lence," in Spenser's manner. He died in 1748. 

22. John Dyer was born in Wales in 1700, published his " Grongar 
Hill" in the year 1726, when Thomson's "Winter" first appeared. 
He had been educated at Westminster School. He abandoned law for 
painting, found himself a poor artist, took orders, got some preferment, 
and wrote, not in the orthodox ten-syllabled couplet, but in octosyllabic 
verse, his " Grongar Hill," celebrating the charms of that hill near his 
birthplace in a strain of the simplest natural poetry. He became rector 
of Belchford, and afterwards of Kirkby, in Lincolnshire ; then Sir John 
Heathcote gave him the rectory of Coningsby in the same county ; and 
there, in 1758, he died of consumption. ■ His "Ruins of Rome," pub- 
lished in 1740, was a poem suggested by his wanderings and sketches in 
Rome as an artist. " The Fleece," in four books, published in 1757, 
was the longest of Dyer's three poems. Beginning with a sketch of 
sheep upon the English downs, he described, in his four books, (1) 
the shepherd's craft, and the sheep-shearing; (2) passed to the wool, its 
qualities and treatment, and the trade created by it for the well-being 
of men; (3) spinning and weaving, roads and rivers by which merchan- 
dise is conveyed about our own country; (4) export trade and commerce 
with the whole world. Dyer's "Fleece" is an elevation of the Georgic 
to the praise of commerce, and shows how the contemplative mind of a 
good natural poet can find a soul of things in the wool-pack. 

William Somerville, a gentleman of property at Edston, Warwick- 
shire, who loved literature and field sports, died in 1742, aged fifty, 
having produced his poems of " The Chase," "Field Sports," " Hob- 
binol, or the Rural Games," etc. 

23. Gilbert West, who was born in 1706, and who died in 1756, 
published in 1749 a translation of Odes of Pindar, and wrote two 
or three poems in the manner of Spenser. John Armstrong (b. 1709, 
d. 1779), a physician, published in 1744 a poem on " The Art of Pre- 
serving Health," and contributed to Thomson's " Castle of Indolence" 
four stanzas at the close of Canto 1, describing the diseases indo- 
lence has caused. 

24. William Shenstone (b. 1714, d. 1763) was the eldest son of a 
gentleman farmer, who owned an estate worth about three hundred 
pounds a year, called the Leasowes, near Hales Owen, in a bit of Shrop- 
shire set in Worcestershire. He was educated as a commoner at Pem- 
broke College, Oxford; and after his father's death ceased to farm the 
small property as before, but wasted its resources in the work of turning 
it into ornamental ground. He suffered house and land to go to ruin, 
that he might make beautiful gardens, with grottos, temples, and in- 
scriptions, according to the invalid taste of his day. Shenstone left 
Leasowes to be sold after his death for payment of the debts incurred in 
beautifying it. His love of natural beauty was blended, far more than 



550 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

in Thomson, with the conventional life of his time; but he wrote pleas- 
ant verse, often with tender simplicity, and, in his "Essays on Men, 
Manners, and Things," pithy prose. Perhaps the origin of his inactive 
life is told by his " Pastoral Ballad in Four Parts," written in 1743. The 
four parts are four love-poems, entitled "Absence," "Hope," "Solici- 
tude," "Despair." Of the fickle fair one, in the strain of "Hope," he 
wrote : 

" One would think she might like to retire 
To the bower I have labored to rear; 
Not a shrub that I heard her admire, 
But I hasted and planted it there." 

And in the strain of " Disappointment: " 

•' Yet time may diminish the pain ; 

The flower, and the shrub, and the tree, 
"Which I reared for her pleasure in vain, 
In time may have comfort for me. 



ye woods, sprea^'your branches apace; 
To your deepest recesses I fly ! 

1 would hide with the beasts of the chase, 
I would vanish from every eye." 



Perhaps this was not an empty sentiment. But in a healthy man 
there is no plea that can make inactivity respectable. Shenstone's 
"Schoolmistress" was first published in 1742, developed from some 
early verse of his. It sketches a village schoolmistress in thirty Spen- 
serian stanzas, with kindly humor and poetic feeling, and is only bad 
as an imitation of Spenser. In that respect it is feeble, with mock 
antique phrases, and eighteenth-century affectations of rusticity. 

25. George Lillo (b. 1693, d. 1739), a London jeweller, had a turn 
for writing plays. He was a Dissenter, who, said Fielding, had the 
spirit of an old Roman joined to the innocence of a primitive Christian. 
There was more of moral purpose than of genius in his tragedies. One 
of them, " George Barnwell," produced about 1731, for a long time kept 
the stage. Another citizen, Edward Moore (b. 1712, d. 1757), bred 
as a linen-draper, had an earnest purpose in his three plays, of which 
one, "The Foundling," produced in 1748, was censured for its resem- 
blance to Steele's "Conscious Lovers;" and the tragedy of "The 
Gamester" had imperfect success, because of the righteous severity 
with which it attacked a fashionable vice of the day. David Mallet 
(b. about 1700, d. 1765), besides writing the tragedies of "Eurydice," 
in 1731, and " Mustapha," in 1739, and working with Thomson, in 1740, 
at the masque of "Alfred," published also, in 1740, the "Life of Lord- 
Chancellor Bacon," in which, as Warburton says, he forgot that Bacon 
was a philosopher. Among Mallet's poems is the ballad of "William 
and Margaret," a sentimental double to the old ballad of "Sweet 
William's Ghost," which had been given by Allan Ramsay in his " Tea- 
table Miscellany." In the original ballad the tormented ghost of an 



To A.D. 1750.] STEPHEN DUCK. 551 

1111 worthy Sweet William visits Marjorie, and shows her at his grave that 
which makes her give back to him the plight of troth he suffers for 
having broken: 

" And she took up her white, -white hands, 
And struck him on the breast, 
Saying, ' Have here again thy faith and troth, 
And I wish your soul good rest.' " 

In Mallet's ballad, Margaret, killed by William's faithlessness, comes to 
the living William and draws him to her grave, where "thrice he called 
on Margaret's name, And thrice he wept full sore; Then laid his cheek to 
her cold grave, And word spoke never more." Mallet said that the 
ballad was suggested to him by lines in Fletcher's " Knight of the Burn- 
ing Pestle:" 

" When it was grown to dark midnight, 

And all were fast asleep, 
In came Margaret's grimly ghost 

And stood at Will'am's feet." 

The reviving taste for simple writing is indicated by this piece, as by 
Shenstone's " Jemmy Dawson." Vincent Bourne (b. about 1097, d. 
1747), a sub-master of Westminster School, who was the best Latin poet 
of his time, turned "William and Margaret" into Latin, as " Thyrsis 
et Chloe." Vincent Bourne's Latin poems were collected in 1772. 
William Whitehead (b. 1715, d. 1785), son of a baker at Cambridge, 
was educated at Winchester School and Cambridge, became tutor to the 
son of Lord Jersey, wrote poems and plays, prospered by the good will 
of the Jersey family, and, in 1757, succeeded Cibber as poet-laureate. 
Paul Whitehead (b. 1710, d. 1774) was of another family, born in 
London, and apprenticed to a mercer before he entered the Temple. He 
married a rich wife, and also obtained a place worth eight hundred 
pounds a year. Among his verse was " The Gymnasiad," a mock heroic 
against the taste for boxing. Richard Glover (b. 1712, d. 1785), son 
and partner of a London merchant trading with Hamburg, published, 
at the age of twenty-five, in 1737, a serious epic poem on " Leonidas." 
It appealed to patriotic feeling, and was very popular. In 1739 he pro- 
duced another poem, "London; or, the Progress of Commerce;" and 
the ballad of "Hosier's Ghost," to rouse national feeling against Spain. 
He produced, in 1753, a tragedy, " Boadicea," and afterwards "Medea" 
and "Jason." He entered Parliament at the beginning of the reign of 
George III. Christopher Pitt (b. 1099, d. 1748), educated at Win- 
chester School and New College, Oxford, was Rector of Pimpern, in 
Dorsetshire. He wrote some original verse, published in 1725 a "Trans- 
lation of Vida's Art of Poetry," and in 1740 a "Translation of the 
iEneid." Stephen Duck, who began life as a thresher, had a turn for 
verse, which was developed in his early manhood by the reading of 
Milton, who inspired him with a deep enthusiasm. His chief pieces, 
drawn from his work and his religion, were "The Thresher's Labour," 



502 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

and "The Shunamite." Spence's good offices obtained for Stephen 
Duck a pension of thirty pounds from Queen Caroline, and afterwards, 
when he had prepared himself for holy orders, the living of Byfleet, in 
Surrey. Like his friend Spence, Stephen Duck died by drowning. He 
fell into religious melancholy, and committed suicide from a bridge near 
Beading, in 1756. 

26. Edward Young, also, was a Winchester boy, son of a 
chaplain to William III., and born in 1681 at Upham, near Win- 
chester. He passed from Winchester School to New College, 
obtained a fellowship at All Souls, and published his first verse 
in Queen Anne's reign, in 1712, an " Epistle to the Right Hon- 
orable George Lord Lansdowne," and a poem on "The Last 
Day " in 1713. He produced, in the reign of George I., 
his tragedies of " Busiris, King of Egypt," and "The Re- 
venge," both acted at Drury Lane, in 1719. In 1725-26 ap- 
peared his "Love of Fame, the Universal Passion," in seven 
satires. He took orders soon afterward, became chaplain to 
George II.,' and was presented bj v his college to the living of 
Welwyn, Herts. In 1730 he published "Two Epistles to Mr. 
Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age," satires in aid of 
Pope against the Dunces. Dr. Young — he had graduated as 
LL.D. — married, in 1731, the daughter of the Earl of Lich- 
field, and widow of Colonel Lee. She died in 1741. While 
in grief for this, he began to write his "Night Thoughts." 
"The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts," in nine parts, first 
appeared in 1742-46. In 1755 Young published a prose- 
book, " The Centaur not Fabulous ; in Six Letters to a Friend 
on the Life in Vogue," — the Centaur being the profligate 
seeker of pleasure, in whom the brute runs away with the 
man. Young died in 1765. The leading subject of Young's 
"Night Thoughts" is the Immortality of the Soul; but, with 
aim to produce good lines that very often hit the mark, the 
treatment of the theme has a gloom not proper to it, although 
characteristic of much of the literature of his time. Robert 
Blair (b. 1700, d. 1746), the minister of Athelstaneford, in 
Haddingtonshire, published his poem of "The Grave" in 
1743. 

27. William Collins (b. 1721, d. 1759), the son of a hatter 
at Chichester, was another Winchester boy. He passed from 



To A. D. 175©.] RICHARD SAVAGE. 553 

Winchester to Oxford in 1740; published, in 1742, his "Per- 
sian Eclogues," afterwards republished under the title of " Ori- 
ental Eclogues ; " and, having taken his degree of B.A., came 
to London with genius and ambition, but an irresolute mind, 
not wholly sound. He suffered much from poverty. In 1 747 
he published his " Odes," polished with nice care, and classical 
in the best sense, rising above the affectations of the time, 
and expressing subtleties of thought and feeling with simple 
precision. " The Ode to Evening " is unrhymecl, in a measure 
like that of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." The Ode on "The 
Passions," for music, rose in energy of thought and skill of 
expression to the level even of Dryden's " Alexander's Feast." 
But the volume was not well received. When Thomson died, 
in 1748, William Collins wrote an ode suggested hy the event. 
In 1749 Collins was released from want by the death of his 
mother's brother, Colonel Martyn, who had often helped him, 
and now left him about two thousand pounds. But, in another 
year, his reason began to fail. He had been in a lunatic- 
asylum at Chelsea before he was removed to Chichester in 
1754. There his sister took charge of him, and he died, at 
the age of thirt3'-eight, in June, 1759. When the great cloud 
was coming over him, he carried but one book about with hirn 
— a child's school Bible. "I have but one book," he said, 
"but that is the best;" and when he suffered most, in his 
latter days at Chichester, a neighboring vicar said, "Walking 
in my vicaral garden one Sunday evening, during Collins's 
last illness, I heard a female (the servant, I suppose) reading 
the Bible in his chamber. Mr. Collins had been accustomed to 
rave much, and make great moanings ; but while she was read- 
ing, or rather attempting to read, he was not only silent, 
but attentive likewise, correcting her mistakes, which, indeed, 
were very frequent, through the whole of the twenty-seventh 
chapter of Genesis." 

28. Richard Savage, born in 1698, was a natural son of 
the Countess of Macclesfield. When he accidentally discovered 
who was his mother she repelled, him. He wrote plays, and 
was befriended by Steele, lived an ill-regulated life, killed a 
man in a tavern brawl, was found guilty, and had his mother 



554 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700. 

active in opposing the endeavors made to obtain mercy for hirn. 
He was pardoned, and stayed from writing against his mother 
by a pension of two hundred pounds a } T ear from Lord Tyrcon- 
nel, who also received Savage into his family. He published, 
in 1729, a moral poem called " The Wanderer." Lord Tyrcon- 
nel found Savage's wild way of life unendurable, and Savage, 
asked not to spend all his nights in taverns, resolved to " spurn 
that friend who should presume to dictate to him." They 
parted. Savage attacked his mother in a poem called "The 
Bastard : inscribed with all due reverence to Mrs. Brett, once 
Countess of Macclesfield; " in another poem, " The Progress 
of a Divine," he described a profligate priest who rose by wick- 
edness, aud who found at last a patron in the Bishop of 
London. He received fifty pounds a year from the queen, 
and, when he received the monej 7 annually, disappeared till it 
was spent. After the queen's death his friends promised to 
find him fifty pounds a year, if he would live quietly in 
Wales. He went to Wales, but was coming back to London 
when he was arrested for debt, died in prison, Jury 31, 1743, 
and was buried at the expense of his jailer. Johnson, who 
knew and pitied him, — as poor as he, and knowing what the 
struggle was in which Savage had fallen, while he rose himself 
in dignity, — said, " Those are no proper judges of his conduct 
who have slumbered awa}' their time on the down of plenty." 
He told Savage's sad tale with the kindliness of a true nature, 
while he drew from it the lesson, "that nothing will supply the 
want of prudence ; and that negligence and irregularity, long 
continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and 
genius contemptible." 



CHAPTER Xin. 

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: 
SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION. 

1. Thomas Burnet.— 2. William WJiiston.— 3. Richard Bentley. — 4. George Berke- 
ley.— o. David Hartley. — 61 Bernard de Mandeville. — 7. Henry St. John.— 
8. Isaac Watts. — 9. Joseph Butler. — 10. John Wesley; Charles Wesley. — 11. 
William Warburton. — 12. Francis Atterbury; Samuel Clarke; Benjamin 
Hoadly. 

1. Thomas Burnet was born about 1635, was educated at Cam- 
bridge, and became, in 16S5, Master of the Charterhouse. Four years 
before, he had published his "Telluris Theoria Sacra," in which he dis- 
cussed the natural history of our planet, in its origin, its changes, and 
its consummation, and the four books contain — (1) The Theory of the 
Deluge by Dissolution of the Outer Crust of the Earth, its Subsidence 
in the Great Abyss, and the Forming of the Earth as it now Exists; 
(2) Of the First Created Earth and Paradise; (3) Of the Conflagration of 
the World; and (4) Of the New Heavens and the New Earth, and the 
Consummation of all Things. This new attempt made by a doctor of 
divinity to blend large scientific generalization with study of Scripture, 
more imaginative than scientific, stirred many fancies, and was much 
read and discussed. But, under William III., Thomas Burnet's specu- 
lations in his " Archseologiae Philosophicae Libri Duo" drew on him 
strong theological censure ; and he was called an infidel by many because 
he read the Fall of Adam as an allegory. This not only destroyed his 
chance of high promotion in the church, but caused him to be removed 
from the office of Clerk of the Closet to the king, and he died at a good 
old age, in 1715, still Master of the Charterhouse. 

2. William Whiston, who was born in 1667, was chaplain to a 
bishop when, in 1696, he published "A New Theory of the Earth, from 
its Original to the Consummation of all Things." This fed the new 
appetite for cosmical theories with fresh speculation. In Burnet's 
system, fire, in Whiston's, water, played chief part as the great agent of 
change. In 1698 Whiston became Vicar of Lowestoft, and in 1700 he 
lectured at Cambridge, as deputy to Newton, whom he succeeded in the 
Lucasian professorship. In Queen Anne's reign his search for a primi- 
tive Christianity affected his theology, and brought on him loss of his 
means of life in the church and university. He taught science; lived, 

555 



556 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

as a poor man, a long and blameless life, until his death, in 1752; and 
in his writings blended love of nature with the love of God. 

3. Richard Bentley, born in 1662, the son of a small 
farmer in Yorkshire, received his education at Cambridge, and 
became the greatest scholar in England. In his " Epistola ad 
Clarum Virum Joannem Millium," he first publicly displayed 
the powers of his mind and the extent of his learning ; and his 
reputation was raised to the highest point by his ''Disserta- 
tion upon the Epistles of Phalaris," published in 1699. In 
1700, he was made Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; in 
1717, he was made Regius Professor of Divinity. His great 
learning was further exhibited in his editions of Homer, Phae- 
dra s, Terence, and "Paradise Lost." He died in 1742. 

4. George Berkeley was born in the county of Kilkenny, 
in 1685. He w T as educated at the Kilkenny Grammar School 
and Trinity College, Dublin, of which he became a fellow in 
1707. In 1709 appeared Berkeley's " New Theory of Vision ; " 
in 1710, his " Principles of Human Knowledge ; " in 1713, his 
" Dialogues between H3'las and Philonous ; " and in 1732, his 
" Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher." He opposed the 
materialist tendencies of the time with a metaphysical theory 
that represented an extreme re-action from them. The exist- 
ence of matter could no more, he said, be proved, than the 
existence of the spirit could be disproved. We know only that 
we receive certain impressions on the mind. Berkeley was 
made Bishop of Cloyne in 1735, and died in 1753. 

5. David Hartley (b. 1705, d. 1757) was a physician, educated at 
Cambridge, who, in 1749, published "Observations on Man; his Frame, 
his Duty, and his Expectations," arguing that vibrations of the nerves 
produce all intellectual energy, by causing the association of ideas. 

6. Bernard de Mandeville represented the rising tendency 
to speculate on the corruptions of society. Great principles 
still underlying public contests were now buried under party 
feuds and personal ambitions. Men were growing up with 
little in the public life about them to inspire a noble faith, 
or stir them to the depths. Polite life in the time of George I. 
had become artificial ; with small faith in human nature, neg- 
ligent of truth. The fashionable world had the king's mistress 



ToA.D. 1750.I BERXABD T)E MAKDEVILLE. 557 

for a leader ; and the prevailing influence of French fashion, 
which had been low at its best, was degraded since the death 
of Louis XIV., in 1715. The court of France was sinking into 
infamy. Polite society in France was the more tainted, and 
the nation suffered many tyrannies. Mandeville, born at Dort. 
in Holland, about 1670, graduated as a physician, and practised 
in England. After a coarse, outspoken book, in 1709, he pub- 
lished, in 1711, " A Treatise on the Hypochondriac and Hysteric 
Diseases," in three dialogues, with amusing strictures upon 
medical follies; and in 1714 appeared a short poem of five 
hundred lines, called " The Grumbling Hive ; or, Knaves Turned 
Honest." yhere was a volume, in 1720, of "Free Thoughts 
on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness," and "The 
Grumbling Hive " re-appeared, in 1723, with a full prose com- 
mentaiy, as "The Fable of the Bees." This book outraged 
conventional opinion, by working out an argument that civiliza- 
tion is based on the vices of society. The bees lived in their 
hives as men, "Millions endeavoring to supply Each other's 
lust and vanity;" lawyers, physicians, priests, thriving upon 
the feuds, follies, and vices of mankind. Luxury emplo}*ed 
its million, pride its million, envy stirred men to work. Fickle- 
ness of idle fashion was the wheel that kept trade moving. 
But the hive grumbled at the vice within it, and the knaves 
turned honest. In half an hour meat fell a penny a pound ; 
masks fell from all faces. The bar was silent, because there 
were no more frauds ; judges, jailers, and Jack Ketch retired, 
with all their pomp. The number of the doctors was reduced 
to those who knew that the}* had earned their skill. Clergy 
who knew themselves to be unfit for their duty resigned their 
cures. All lived within their incomes, and paid read}* money. 
Glory by war and foreign conquest was laughed at by these 
honest bees, who "fight but for their country's sake, When 
right or liberty's at stake." Then followed fall of prices, 
extinction of trades founded upon luxury, and of the com- 
merce that supplied it. These glories of civilization are gone, 
still Peace and Plenty reign, and every thing is cheap, though 
plain. At last the dwellers in the honest hive appeared so 
much reduced as to become a mark for foreign insult, and they 



558 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

were attacked. Because there was no hireling in their army, 
but all were bravely fighting for their own, their courage and 
integrity were crowned with victory. But they suffered much 
loss in the conflict. "Hardened with toils and exercise, They 
counted ease itself a vice ; Which so improved their temperance, 
That, to avoid extravagance, They flew into a hollow tree, Blest 
with content and honesty." This satire, with the remarkably 
plain speaking in the appended notes and dissertations — one 
" A Search into the Nature of Society" — startled man}' people ; 
and in 1 723 the book was presented by the Grand Jury of West- 
minster as one ' ' having a direct tendency to the subversion of 
all religion and civil government, our duty to the Almighty, our 
love to our country, and regard to our oaths." Bernard de 
Mandeville, who certainly meant none of these things, but whose 
book was as a first faint swell before the rising of another 
mighty wave of thought, published a second volume of it in 
1729. He was partly supported by some Dutch merchants, 
and had for his patron the first Earl of Macclesfield. In 1732 
he published "An Inquiry into the Origin of Honor, and the 
Usefulness of Christianity in War ; " and he died in 1733. 

7. Henry 'St. John (afterwards Lord Bolingbroke) was 
born in 1678 ; and entering Parliament in 1701, became one of 
the best speakers there, and a very powerful politician. After 
the death of Queen Anne, he was dismissed from the office of 
Secretary of State, which he had held several 3 r ears. In 1715 
he was impeached for high treason by Robert Walpole, attainted, 
and had his name erased from the roll of peers. He became 
for a time Secretary of State to the Pretender, who gave him 
a paper earldom, dealt treacherously with him, entered upon 
the Scottish rebellion against his counsels, and dismissed him 
summarily after his return. Bolingbroke had seen enough of 
Jacobitism at headquarters, knew that its last chance of success 
was lost, and gave it up. He lived for the next seven years 
in exile at La Source, near Orleans. His wife died in 1718, 
and in May, 1720, he privately married the widow of the 
Marquis de Villette. At La Source, in harmony with the 
new tone of French thought, Bolingbroke began his philo- 
sophical writings, and was visited by young Voltaire. His 



To A. D. 1750.] ISAAC WATTS. 559 

French wife managed his return to England in 1723, through 
the Duchess of Kendal, with a bribe of eleven thousand pounds. 
In 1725 he obtained a grant of restored property, but not the 
reversal of attainder, which would restore him to the House of 
Lords and political life. He bought an estate at Dawley, near 
Uxb ridge, within easy ride of Twickenham. There he affected 
philosophical contempt of ambition, and played at farming. 
He was much visited by Pope ; and by Swift also when, in 
1726, Swift came to England. But Bolingbroke had ambition, 
and took his place as the most vigorous writer against Sir 
Robert Walpole, by his letters in "The Craftsman," after 
1726 ; and a series of letters, called " The Occasional Writer," 
begun in January, 1727. Some of these were afterwards re- 
published as "A Dissertation on Parties," in nineteen letters; 
and as "Remarks on the Histoiy of England," signed 
" Humping Old castle," and ironically dedicated to Walpole. 
Bolingbroke' s writing gave "The Craftsman" a sale far ex- 
ceeding even that of "The Spectator." After this, in 1735, 
he retired again to France, until the death of his father called 
him home in 1742. He himself died in 1751. The religion 
expressed in Bolingbroke 's essa}'S on Human Knowledge, and 
in "The Philosophical Writings," published by David Mallet, 
in 1753-54, was contained in his parting words to Lord Ches- 
terfield, after he had given orders that none of the clergy 
should visit him in his last moments: "God, who placed me 
here, will do what he pleases with me hereafter ; and he knows 
best what to do. May he bless you." 

8. Isaac Watts, born at Southampton in 1674, son of a 
Nonconformist schoolmaster, became first a tutor, then pastor 
of a congregation in Mark-Lane ; and after the failure of his 
health in 1712, retained his pastoral charge, preaching when he 
could, and lived as guest with his friends, Sir Thomas and Lady 
Abney, at Theobalds, until 1748, the year of his death. In 
1728 he had been made D.D. by the universities of Edinburgh 
and Aberdeen. He published "Horse Lyricae " in 1706, 
"H}-mns" in 1707, "Psalms and Hymns" in 1719, "Divine 
and Moral Songs for Children" in 1720; and, among various 
other works, a volume of " Logic," in 1725. There was a 
supplement on "Improvement of the Mind," in 1741. 



560 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1700 

9. In 1736 Joseph Butler (b. 1692. d. 1752). son of a 
Presbyterian at Wantage, and first educated at a school for 
Dissenters, and then at Oxford, had become one of the chief 
preachers in the Church of England, when, in 1736. he sought 
to satisfy the questioner by his " Analogy of Religion. Natu- 
ral and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature." 
In 173S Butler was made a bishop. 

10. John "Wesley (b. 17^3. d. 1791) and his brother 
Charles (b. 1708. d. 1788) produced in 1738 their " Collec- 
tion of Psalms and Hymns." John Wesley was a clergyman's 
son. educated at the Charterhouse, and at C mist church. Oxford, 
where his brother Charles followed him from "Westminster. 
Charles persuaded some undergraduates to join with him in 
seeking religious improvement, living by rule, and taking the 
sacrament weekly. They were laughed at as '-Bible Moths," 
; " The Godly Club." etc. Then somebody, noticing their 
methodical ways, said that, like the old school of physicians so 
called, here was a new school of " Methodists." This name 
abided by them. John, when he returned to Oxford, became 
leader of the little society established by his brother. Then 
there was added strong influence upon his mind by the Mora- 
vians, and by his associate. George Whitefield (b. 1714. 
d. 1770). and soon John Wesley began to influence the 
people as a preacher, with an enthusiasm that gave life to their 
religion. In 1749 Wesley published at Bristol, where he had 
built a meeting-house. " A Plain Account of the People called 
Methodists." Among Wesley's other writings was. in 1763, 
w * A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation." Meth- 
odism under John Wesley became an organized association, 
with himself for its directing head. The conditions of mem- 
bership were prayer, and study of Scripture, with a resolved 
attempt to avoid vices and follies, practise Christian virtue-, 
and bear in patience the reproach of men. for Christ's sake. 
Wesley sought, in fact, to join men in one grand endeavor to 
(be true, without fear of the world and its conventions. 

11. William Warburton, bom in 1698. son of the town 
clerk at Xewark-upon-Trent. was educated at the grammar 
school there, and then articled to an attorney, with whom he 



To A.D. 1750.] WILLIAM WARBURTON. 561 

served five years. In 1723 he took deacon's orders, and in 
1724 published " Miscellaneous Translations, in Prose and 
Verse, from Roman Poets, Orators, and Historians," with a 
Latin dedication to Sir Robert Sutton, who gave him a small 
Nottinghamshire vicarage in 1727. He then came to London 
with a few introductions, one to Theobald, whom he helped a 
little in his Shakespeare. In 1727 he dedicated to Sir Robert 
Sutton, whose wife was the Countess of Sunderland, " A 
Critical and Philosophical Inquiry into the Causes of Prodigies 
and Miracles, as related by Historians, with an Essay towards 
Restoring a Method and Purity in History." Sir Robert caused 
Warburton to be put on George II. 's list of Masters of Arts, 
created when he visited Cambridge in 1728 ; and procured for 
him the better living of Brand-Broughton, in Lincolnshire, 
where Warburton lived man}* 3*ears with his mother and sisters. 
In 1736 he produced a book on the " Alliance between Church 
and State," which went through four editions in his lifetime; 
and in 1738, the first volume of " The Divine Legation of Mo- 
ses Demonstrated." This led to controvers}*, and was followed 
by a "Vindication." In the same year, 1738, Warburton was 
made Chaplain to the Prince of Wales. When M. de Crousaz, 
Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics in the university of 
Lausanne, attacked " The Essay on Man," Warburton defended 
Pope in several letters. This established the friendship between 
Pope and Warburton. In 1741 Pope introduced his friend to 
Ralph Allen, at Prior Park, near Bath. Warburton afterwards 
added a commentary to Pope's " Essaj* on Man " and " Essa}* 
on Criticism," and was left, in 1744, Pope's literaiy executor. 
In 1746 he married Ralph Allen's niece and heiress, Miss 
Gertrude Tucker, and thenceforth lived chiefly at Prior Park, 
which became his own when Allen died, in 1764. In 1747 
Warburton followed Hanmer in the series of editions of Shake- 
speare. Pope's edition, in 1725, and Theobald's, in 1733, had 
been followed, in 1744, by the edition of Sir Thomas Hanmer, 
thirty }*ears member, and at last Speaker of the House of Com- 
mons. Now came that of Warburton, in 1747, with much 
rash and dogmatic change, but not a few happy suggestions. 
These were the editions preceding that of Samuel Johnson, 



562 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700. 

in 1765, all from Pope's downward resting their claim to credit 
on conjectural dealing with the text, but all helping to fix 
attention on the greatest of all poets. Warburton became 
King's Chaplain in 1754 ; got, in 1755, the Lambeth degree of 
D.D. from Archbishop Herring; in 1757 became Dean of 
Bristol, and in 1760 Bishop of Gloucester. He died in 1779. 
aged eighty-one. 

12. Francis Atterbury (b. 1662, d. 1732), educated at Oxford, became 
distinguished as pulpit-orator, wit, prelate, and politician. He published 
a Latin version of Dryden's " Absalom and Aehitophel," and many con- 
troversial pamphlets relating to letters, ecclesiastical matters, and civil 
government. In 1740 his "Sermons and Discourses" were issued in 
four volumes; and in 17S9-9S, his "Miscellaneous "Works," in five 
volumes. Samuel Clarke (b. 1675, d. 1729), distinguished himself as a 
mathematician at Cambridge, and became proficient in ancient languages 
and divinity. He received holy orders in 1698. Among his publications 
are " A Paraphrase on the Four Evangelists;" "Three Practical Essays 
on Baptism, Confirmation, and Bepentance*" "The Scripture Doctrine 
of the Trinity; " " Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God;" 
"Sermons;" and numerous writings on mathematics and natural phi- 
losophy. Benjamin Hoadly (b. 1676, d. 1761), became Bishop of Ban- 
gor in 1715, afterwards of Hereford, of Salisbury, and of Winchester; 
and published a work on miracles; " The Beasonableness of Conformity 
to the Church of England;" " A Brief Defence of Episcopal Ordina- 
tion ; " "A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Lord's Supper ; " 
and many sermons. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: 

HISTORIANS, PAMPHLETEERS, AND 

NOVELISTS. 

1. John Oldmixon. — 2. George Lyttelton. — 3. I>aniel Defoe. — 4. Samuel Rich- 
ardson.— 5. Henry Fielding. 

1. John Oldmixon, born in 1673, of a Somersetshire family, pub- 
lished in 1698 a translation of Tasso's "Amyntas," and in 1700 "The 
Grove; or, Love's Paradise," an opera. Afterward, he took especial 
interest in history. He produced, early in the reign of George L, 
" Memoirs of North Britain," and " Memoirs of Ireland from the Res- 
toration," and he began, towards the end of the reign, "A Critical His- 
tory of England." 

2. George Lyttelton, born in 1709, at Hagley, Worcestershire, friend 
to Fielding and to some of the best poets of his time, was educated at 
Eton and Oxford, and became secretary to Frederick, Prince of Wales, 
when he was in opposition to George II. He became a Lord of the 
Treasury after Sir Robert Walpole's resignation, then Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, and afterwards took a peerage. He printed verses, also 
"Letters from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan," in 1735; 
"Dialogues of the Dead;" and in 1767, "The History of the Life of 
King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he Lived," a book 
upon which he had been at work for thirty years. He died in 1773. 

3. Daniel Defoe, born in 1661, was the son of James 
Foe, a well-to-do butcher, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripple- 
gate. His father, a Dissenter, sent him to the school kept at 
Newington Green by Charles Morton, a good scholar, who in- 
cluded English among school studies, and afterwards, when 
driven to America by persecution, became Vice-President of 
Harvard College. After a full training with Mr. Morton, 
Daniel Foe began the world in Freeman's Court, Cornhill, as 
an agent between manufacturers and retailers in the hosiery 
trade. After the accession of James II. he was one of those 
citizens of London who, when they heard Monmouth had landed, 

563 



564 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1700 

rode away to join him. He was with Monmouth at Sedgemoor. 
After that, according to one account, he left England ; went to 
Spain and Portugal as a trader ; . but when the cruel search 
for Monmouth's followers had long been over he returned, 
having picked up abroad the fane}' for a ' ' De ' ' before his 
name. Three pamphlets, belonging to this period, are at- 
tributed to him. One was "A Tract against the Proclamation 
for the Repeal of the Penal Laws," then came " A Pamphlet 
against the Addresses to King James," and yet again "A 
Tract upon the Dispensing Power." 

After the accession of William III., Defoe married. He 
soon lost all his possessions by speculation ; and to escape the 
prison which was threatened, he withdrew for two years to 
Bristol. There he wrote his " Essaj- on Projects," which was 
published in 1698. It suggested many things — improvement 
in roads, reforms in banking, a savings bank for the poor, 
insurance offices, an academy like that of France, a military 
college, abolition of the press-gang, and a college for the 
higher education of women. "A woman," said Defoe, "well- 
bred and well-taught, furnished with the additional accomplish- 
ments of knowledge and behavior, is a creature without com- 
parison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments ; 
she is all softness and sweetness, love, wit, and delight." 
One project, also, was for improvement of the law of debtor 
and creditor. When he had compounded with his creditors, 
and thus secured for himself liberty to work, he returned to 
London, and worked on till he had paid voluntarily bej^ond the 
composition the last penny of his debts. His patriotic sugges- 
tions of plans for raising war-money caused Defoe to be em- 
ployed from 1695 to 1699 as accountant to the Commissioners 
of the Glass Duty. 

To the cry raised by the Opposition that King William was 
no true-born Englishman, especially represented by the bad 
poem of one Tutchin, called " The Foreigners," Defoe replied, 
in 1701, with his satire of "The True-born Englishman," 
rlrymes of which eighty thousand copies were sold in the 
streets. Among their home-truths are vigorous assertions of 
the claims of the people against persecution in the Church or 



To A.D. 1750.] DANIEL DEFOE. 5tio 

despotism in the State. In these he finds as dangerous a thing 

"A ruling priesthood, as a priest-rid king; 
And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, 
Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst." 

While of the kings false to their trust he says : 

" When kings the sword of justice first lay down, 
They are no kings, though they possess the crown. 
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things; 
The good of subjects is the end of kings." 

Then came to the throne Queen Anne, and hard words hailed 
on the Dissenters. A substantial blow was aimed in a bill that 
was to disqualify them from all civil employments. It passed 
the Commons, but failed with the Lords. Sacheverell, preach- 
ing at Oxford, had denounced him as no true son of the Church 
who did not raise against Dissent " the bloody flag and banner 
of defiance." But, in 1702, Defoe spoke boldly on behalf of 
libert}- of conscience, in his pamphlet called "The Shortest 
Way with the Dissenters." He wrote, as in all his contro- 
versial pieces, to maintain a principle, and not a party. 

He began his satire with a quotation from Roger L'Estrange's Fables. 
A cock at roost in a stable, having dropped from his perch, and finding 
himself in much danger among restless heels, had a fair proposal to make 
to the horses — that we shall all of us keep our legs quiet. This fable 
Defoe applied to the Dissenters, who were then asking for equal treat- 
ment, although they had been intolerant enough themselves not long 
since, when they had the upper hand. Professing, in his assumed char- 
acter of a bigoted High Churchman of the day, to show the vice of Dis- 
sent before teaching its cure, he dealt, in the first place, a fair blow to 
his own side for past intolerance. The Dissenters ought not, perhaps, 
to have been blind to the irony of the second half of the pamphlet; but 
in the first half the irony is not all against ecclesiastical intolerance. 
Defoe was against all intolerance, and to the bigotry of his own party 
Defoe gave the first hit. The succeeding satire, since it could not easily 
surpass the actual extravagance of party spirit, had in it nothing but the 
delicate, sustained sharpness of ironical suggestion to reveal the author's 
purpose to the multitude. Several reasons, he said, are urged on behalf 
of the Dissenters, " why we should continue and tolerate them among 
us:" as, "They are very numerous, they say; they are a great part of 
the nation, and we cannot suppress them. To this may be answered, 
They are not so numerous as the Protestants in France, and yet the 
French king effectually cleared the nation of them at once, and we don't 



5Q6 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

find lie misses them at home." Besides, " the more numerous the more 
dangerous, and therefore the more need to suppress them; and if we are 
to allow them only because we cannot suppress them, then it ought to 
be tried whether we can or no." It is said, also, that their aid is wanted 
against the common enemy. This, argues Defoe, is but the same argu- 
ment of inconvenience of war-time that was urged against suppressing 
the old money; and the hazard, after all, proved to be small. " We can 
never enjoy a settled uninterrupted union and tranquillity in this nation 
till the spirit of Whiggism, faction, and schism is melted down like the 
old money." The gist of the pamphlet, the scheme set forth on the title- 
page as the Shortest Way with the Dissenters, is propounded in this pas- 
sage: — "If one severe law were made, and punctually executed, that 
whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished the nation, and 
the preacher be hanged, we should soon see an end of the tale; they 
would all come to church, and one age would make us one again. To 
talk of five shillings a month for not coming to the sacrament, and one 
shilling a week for not coming to church — this is such a way of con- 
verting people as never was known, this is selling them a liberty to 
transgress for so much money. If it be not a crime, why don't we give 
them full license ? And if it be, no price ought to compound for the 
committing it ; for that is selling a liberty to people to sin against God 
and the Government. . . . We hang men for trifles, and banish them 
for things not worth naming; but an offence against God and the 
church, against the welfare of the world and the dignity of religion, 
shall be bought off for five shillings. This is such a shame to a Chris- 
tian government, that 'tis with regret I transmit it to posterity." 

The pamphlet delighted men of the Sacheverell school. A 
Cambridge fellow thanked his bookseller for having sent him 
so excellent a treatise — next to the Holy Bible and the Sacred 
Comments, the most valuable he had ever seen. Great was the 
re-action of wrath when the pamphlet was found to be a Dis- 
senter's satire ; nevertheless, the Dissenters held by their first 
outcry against the author. Defoe paid for this service to the 
English people, in the pillory and as a prisoner in Newgate. 
But his "Hymn to the Pillory," which appeared on the first 
of the three da}~s of the shame of the government in his ex- 
posure, July 29, 30, and 31, in the }~ear 1703, turned the course 
of popular opinion against the men who placed him there — 
men, as his v hyme said, scandals to the times, who 

"Are at a loss to find bis guilt. 
And can't commit his crimes." 

Defoe returned from the pilloiy to Newgate, whence he was 



To A.D. 1750.] DANIEL DEFOE. 567 

not released till Jul}' or August, 1704. It was in Newgate, 
therefore, that he began his career as the first critical and 
independent journalist, by producing his " Review." This was 
begun on the 19th of Februaiy, 1704, came out on Saturdays 
and Tuesdays until the end of February, 1705, and then three 
times a week till June 11, 1713. 

While still writing his " Review," and, among other works, 
publishing, in 1706, a long poem in folio, "Jure Divino," in 
favor of limited monarchy, and against the doctrine of divine 
right in kings, Defoe was actively employed in Scotland as a 
promoter of the Union of the legislatures of Scotland and Eng- 
land, which became law on the 1st of May, 1707. In 1709 
Defoe published a " History of the Union between England and 
Scotland." 

He was under persecution for his independence of thought, 
both near the close of Queen Anne's reign, and after the acces- 
sion of George I. For a time, he had withdrawn to Halifax, 
where he lived in Back Lane, at the sign of the " Rose and 
Crown." Against the claims of the Pretender he wrote "A 
Seasonable Warning and Caution," which he distributed gra- 
tuitously among the ignorant country- people in different parts 
of England ; and he wrote two other pamphlets, with titles 
designed to catch Jacobite readers: "And what if the, Pre- 
tender Should Come?" and " Reasons Against the Succession 
of the House of Hanover." For writing these, Defoe was 
arrested and prosecuted in 1713. His enemies declared him 
Jacobite. They might as well, he said, have made him 
Mahometan. He had, in fact, written these pamphlets in the 
interest of Harley ; and to Harley he was indebted for the 
queen's pardon. The persecution was continued under the new 
reign ; for Defoe, with sturdy independence, had opposed false 
cries of every part} T in the state, and had never flinched from 
upholding what he thought sound policy because it came from 
his political opponents. Thus he had incurred a sort of infanry 
by asserting the soundness of what we should now all hold to 
be sound in the treaty of commerce which the Tories had asso- 
ciated with their treaty of peace with France, while he opposed 
the terms of peace ; for at the last elections in Queen Anne's 



568 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

reign, the Whigs raised their battle-cry hotly against the com- 
mercial treat}'. In 1715, Defoe, failing in health, and attacked 
on all sides, wrote his " Appeal to Honor and Justice," being 
a true account of his conduct in public affairs. He had 
reason, he said, to think that his death might be near, and 
wished, before he embarked on his last voyage, to " even ac- 
counts with this world, that no slanders may lie against my 
heirs, to disturb them in the peaceable possession of their 
father's inheritance, his character." Defoe was. in fact, struck 
with apoplex}' before the "Appeal" was finished; and the 
publisher, after waiting six weeks, issued it as it then stood, 
with the note, that, " in the opinion of most who knew him, the 
treatment which he here complains of, and others of which he 
would have spoken, have been the cause of this disaster." 
Defoe said here : " It has been the disaster of all parties in this 
nation to be very hot in their turn, and as often as they have 
been so I have differed from them all, and ever must and shall 
do so." He cited seven chief occasions of such differences 
witu his friends. Against intemperate party warfare, Defoe 
urged that to # attain harmon}' in the State there must be mod- 
eration in the exercise of power by the Government, and that, 
1 ' to attain at the happy calm which is the consideration that 
should move us all (and he would merit to be called the nation's 
physician who could prescribe the specific for it), I think I ma}' 
be allowed to sa} T , a Conquest of parties will never do it ; a 
balance of parties ma}'." After this, Defoe lived at Newington, 
with his wife and six children. There, with a keen sense of 
his own isolation, he now wrote " The Life and Strange Sur- 
prising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, 
who lived Eight and TwemVv Years all alone in an Uninhabited 
Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the great 
River of Oroonoque ; having been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, 
wherein all the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account 
how he was at last as Strangely Delivered by Pirates. Written 
by Himself." The two parts of "Robinson Crusoe" were 
published one at the beginning and the other at the close 
of the year 1719, with prefaces affecting to present them to 
the world as a true narrative of fact. The book had no relation 



To A.D. 1750.] DANIEL DEFOE. 569 

whatever to the existing novel of the French school, or to any 
other kind of novel. It was an imitation of those simple and 
graphic records of adventure by sea, which, since the days of 
Elizabeth, had quickened the delight of England in her sailors. 
If we would bring to mind how much imagination went to 
Defoe's exact suggestion of the real in this thoroughly English 
story-book, let us think how a man of weak imagination would 
have solved the problem : given one man and an island, to 
make a story. In Defoe's stoiy, all is life and action. There 
is no rhetorical lament, or waste of energy upon fine writing ; 
attention, from first to last, is bound to the one man, only the 
more after the man Friday has been added to the scene, and 
the reader is made to feel that health}' life consists in trusting 
God, and using steadily with head and hand whatever faculties 
he gave us. Some part of the charm of the book springs from 
a reality below the feigned orie, Defoe's sense of the fellowship 
of his own life with that of the solitary worker. The sugges- 
tion of the story was found in Captain YToodes Rogers's account 
of his " Cruising Voyage Round the World," published in 1712, 
which told how, in February, 1709, he took from the island of 
Juan Fernandez a seaman, named Alexander Selkirk, who, 
when out on a piratical voyage, had been left ashore on that 
uninhabited island, after a quarrel with his captain, in Septem- 
ber, 1704. Selkirk had been furnished only with a few books, 
nautical instruments, a knife, a boiler, an axe, and a gun, with 
powder and ball. Capt. Rogers had brought him to England 
in 1711. 

Robinson Crusoe was followed b} T Defoe's other novels, which 
still imitated forms of literature distinct from fiction, and some- 
times included pictures of the coarse life of the time. "The 
Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the famous Captain Single- 
ton," and "The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. 
Duncan Campbell,"- appeared in 1720; "Moll Flanders;" 
"The Histon T and remarkable Life of the truly Honorable 
Colonel Jacque," included commonly in genuine accounts of 
highwaj'men, and "A Journal of the Plague Year," which Dr. 
Mead quoted as the narrative of an eye-witness, all in 1722; 
"The Memoirs of a Cavalier" probably in 1723; "Roxana" 



570 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

in 1724 ; " The New Voyage Round the World " in 1725. At 
the beginning of the reign of George II., Defoe is said to have 
produced, in 1728, Captain Carleton's " Memoirs," which Dr. 
Johnson fastened upon as an addition to English history. 
Defoe's health then failed completely, when he had begun 
another book. His last letter was to a son-in-law, when look- 
ing forward to his rest after life's troubled journey : "By what 
way soever He please to bring me to the end of it, I desire to 
finish life with this temper of soul — ' Te Deum lauclamus.' " 
Defoe died in April, 1731. 

4. Samuel Richardson was born in 1689, in Derbyshire, 
one of the nine children of a joiner who had been in business 
in London, and who could afford him onty a common school 
education. As a boy he liked letter-writing, and wrote their 
love-letters for three damsels of his village. In 1706 he was 
apprenticed to a printer in London, served seven 3 T ears, and 
corresponded with a gentleman of fortune who "was a master 
of the epistolary style." When out of his time, he worked five 
or six } T ears as compositor and corrector of the press, married 
his late master's daughter, and set up for himself in a court in 
Fleet Street." Richardson's first wife died in 1731, and he mar- 
ried afterwards the sister of a bookseller at Bath. By his first 
wife he had five boys and a girl, and by his second, five girls and 
a boy. He lost all his sons and two of his daughters ; the 
remaining four daughters had much work in transcribing his 
letters. By ability and stead}' industiy Richardson advanced in 
life, removed to Salisbury Court, and was employed by book- 
sellers, not only to print, but also to make indexes and write 
prefaces and dedications. Two booksellers, Mr. Rivington and 
Mr. Osborne, asked the good printer to write for them a volume 
of " Familiar Letters," in a common st3~le, on such subjects as 
might be of use to those country readers who were unable to 
indite for themselves. Then writes Richardson: " ' Will it be 
an} r harm,' said I, ' in a piece }~ou want to be written so low, if 
we should instruct them how they should think and act in com- 
mon cases, as well as indite ? ' They were the more urgent with 
me to begin the little volume for this hint." He set about it, 
and in the progress of it, writing two or three letters to in- 



To A. D. 1750.I SAMUEL RICHARDSON. 571 

struct handsome girls who were obliged to go out to service 
how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue, 
a story occurred to him that he had heard from a friend many 
years before. He thought that this, if told by letters, " in 
an easy and natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, 
might possibly introduce a new species of writing that might 
possiblv turn young people into a course of reading different 
from the pomp and parade of romance-writing ; and dismiss- 
ing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels gen- 
erally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion 
and virtue." The book, as first complete in two volumes, was 
written in two months, from Nov. 10, 1739, to Jan. 10, 1740, 
published at once, received with great applause, and immedi- 
ately translated into French and Dutch. Richardson, as well 
as he could, brought simple nature into the novel, from which 
it had been altogether banished, and led strong re-action 
against the faith in princes and princesses as the only true 
heroes and heroines. I will take, he snid to himself, a poor 
servant-girl, make her the namesake of one of the choicest of 
romance princesses, — the Pamela of Sidne^y's "Arcadia," — 
set my Pamela corresponding artlessVv with her low-born fa- 
ther and mother, Goodman Andrews and his wife, and make 
3*011 feel that human sympathies are broader than conventional 
distinctions. It was another step from the conventional 
towards that clear light of nature which for most writers was 
still lost in the cloud of French classicism. But as Allan Ram- 
sa}' must needs give a titled father to his Gentle Shepherd, and 
as Thomson's young Lavinia could not make Palemon happy 
without turning out to be the daughter of his noble Mend 

Acasto, 

" whose open stores, 
Though vast, were little to his ampler heart; " 

so in Pamela the conventional homage to rank was still con- 
spicuous. Pamela, left by the death of her mistress subject to 
a young master who was a worthless libertine, resisted infamous 
practices upon her, in the hope that she might thus become his 
wife; and the full title of Richardson's book, "Pamela; or, 
Virtue Rewarded," means that in the end she did, with pious 



572 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

gratitude, marry the scoundrel. As for Goodman Andrews, 
when he heard the glad tidings, his " heart was full; and he 
said, with his hands folded and lifted up. Pray, sir, let me go — 
let me go to my dear wife, and tell her all these blessed things 
while my breath holds ; for it is ready to burst with joy." The 
success of the book caused Richardson to write two more vol- 
umes, which were superfluous, the work having been completed 
as first published. 

In 1748 Richardson took his place in literature by publishing. 
when his age was fifty-nine, the second of his three novels. 
" Clarissa Harlowe." in eight volumes. Here, as always. 
Richardson told his story in the form of correspondence. 
Clarissa Harlowe, a young lady of birth and fortune, pressed 
by her family to marry against her inclination, left home. 
and threw herself on the generosity of her lover. Sir Robert 
Lovelace, an attractive libertine. He persecuted her. and 
treacherously wronged her to the uttermost : she refused then 
his offer of marriage, and died broken-hearted. Lovelace left 
England, not reformed, and was killed in a duel by one of 
Clarissa's relations, Colonel Morden. Clarissa's correspondent 
was Miss Anne Howe, a widow's lively daughter, with a formal 
but estimable suitor, Mr. Hickman. Lovelace had for his cor- 
respondent a friend, Mr. John Belford ; this party of four 
answering the place of hero and male friend, heroine and female 
friend, in the mock classical French tragedies. The moral of 
the piece was, that the most unhappy home is shelter for a 
young girl safer than she may succeed in finding by quitting it 
to trust herself among the snares of life. The book is full of 
improbability; it contains, like "Pamela." scenes unfit to be 
read by the young, and no page of it is like the work of a man 
of genius in texture of thought or vigor of expression. Yet 
the whole effect produced is equal to that of a work of high 
genius. If Richardson's mind was not large, his story filled it. 
His nature, even with all its little pomps and vanities, was 
absorbed in his work ; the ladies about him, who. as the least 
critical of his admirers, were his chosen friends, fed him with 
sweet solicitudes and enthusiasms about the persons of his 
storv ; his fictitious characters and situations lived and were 



ToA.D. 1750.] HENRY FIELDING. 573 

real for him ; and he became the great example, in our litera- 
ture, of the might that comes of giving all one's powers — even 
if the}' be not great powers — to whatever one has to do. By 
thorough ly believing in his work, and giving all his mind to it, 
Samuel Richardson, as novelist, secured the full attention of 
his readers, and sometimes even 03- importunity of tediousness, 
by the drop after drop that in time hollows the stone, compelled 
his readers to see as he saw, feel as he felt, and not seldom to 
weep where he wept — and he wept much himself — over the 
sorrows of Clarissa. 

Richardson published his third and last novel, " Sir Charles 
Grandison," in 1753. He had accused his lad}' correspondents 
of liking Lovelace too well. The}' replied that he had given 
them nobody else to like. Thereupon he resolved to give them 
his ideal of a good man in Sir Charles Grandison, well born, 
rich, accomplished, travelled, and always right, in Richardson's 
view, though he has two heroines in love with him, and is in 
love with each, — the one who did not marry him went mad, — 
and though he fought duels. Richardson could not rise like 
Steele above convention ; but as he knew duelling to be wrong, 
and reasoned against it in his novel, he compromised by making 
Sir Charles so skilful a swordsman that he could disarm without 
murdering an antagonist. Richardson's three novels painted 
life respectively in the lower, middle, and higher classes of so- 
ciety. Richardson, meanwhile, throve in business. His print- 
ing-offices and warehouses at Salisbury Court covered the site 
of eight houses which he had pulled down. In 1755 he removed 
from his country house at North End, Hammersmith, to a house 
at Parson's Green. In 1760 he bought half the patent of Law 
Printer to the King ; and in July, 1761, he died, at the age 
of seventy- two. 

5. The publication of Richardson's first novel, "Pamela," 
struck new life into literature, not only by its bold and direct 
challenge to the romance- writing hitherto in fashion, by what 
was new and right in its plan, but also by what was wrong in its 
plan ; for the flaw in its morality — obscured by the prevalence 
of the low social tone it represented — was obvious to Henry 
Fielding, and in ridicule of this he began to write his ' ' Joseph 



574 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

Andrews." He would pair the virtuous serving-maid with a 
virtuous serving-man. Before he had gone far he felt -his 
strength, and produced not a mere caricature, but a true novel. 
Thus Fielding, our greatest novelist, received his impulse from 
Richardson. 

Fielding was born on the 22d of April, 1707, at Sharpham 
Park, near Glastonbuiy, Somersetshire, son of a Captain Field- 
ing, who was youngest son of the Earl of Desmond. Young 
Henry Fielding was educated at Eton and at the University 
of Le}'den, where he was to stud}- civil law, and did stud} T , 
until the supplies from home failed. His father lived with 
careless extravagance. At twenty, Henry Fielding had to leave 
Leyden and live b}' his wits, with a nominal allowance from 
his father of two hundred pounds a 3-ear. At twentj^-one he 
wrote his first comedy, " Love in Several Masques;" then 
followed "The Temple Beau," "The Author's Farce," "The 
Coffee-House Politician," and " Tom Thumb the Great." The 
last, published as "Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and 
Death of Tom Thumb the Great, with the Annotations of 
Scriblerus Secundus," was a burlesque on the conventional 
fine writing 'of the stage, having an aim like that of Bucking- 
ham's "Rehearsal," and was richly illustrated with ironical 
notes, showing the passages burlesqued. Among the dramatic 
pieces of Fielding were " The Covent Garden Tragedy," a jest 
on Ambrose Philips 's play of " The Distrest Mother ; " " The 
Mock Doctor ; " " The Miser ; ' ' and ' ' Don Quixote in Eng- 
land." During his first ten years in London, Fielding was 
among the plaj'ers at Bartholomew Fair, and kept a booth in 
the George Inn Yard, usually with John Hippesley. The fair 
was a great institution then, and the theatres closed that the 
players might appear in it. It was probably in 1737 that 
Fielding married Miss Craddock, one of three sisters who 
were beauties of Salisbury. The ladj T had fifteen hundred 
pounds, and he had from his mother a small country house at 
East Stour, in Dorsetshire. Fielding had married for love. He 
would live at East Stour and feel the peace of a country life. 
But country life, with open hospitality, horses, coach, and livery 
servants, soon made an end of fifteen hundred pounds. Field- 



To A. D. 1750.] HENRY FIELDING. 575 

ing and his wife then came to lodgings in London with a single 
maid-servant, and Fielding worked for bread. He formed, in 
1736, a "Great Mogul's Company of Comedians," and pro- 
duced with great success " Pasquin : a Dramatic Satire on the 
Times," its plan a mock rehearsal of two plays. In 1737 he 
continued his free dramatic criticism upon life and politics with 
a piece called "The Historical Register for 1736," Sir Robert 
AValpole figuring in the piece as "Quidam." The result of 
this was the passing, in June, 1737, of the Act which forbade 
any play to be represented before it had obtained the license 
of the Lord Chamberlain. The Licensing Act broke up the 
Great Mogul's Company, and in November Fielding entered 
himself as a student of the Middle Temple. To a paper of 
periodical essays, called the "Champion," Fielding became 
an active contributor from November, 1739, to June, 1740, 
creating representatives of the chief subjects of discussion in 
the Vinegar family. In June, 1740, he was called to the bar, 
and began practice on the Western Circuit. In June, 1741, his 
father died, but there was nothing to inherit. In February, 
1742, Fielding published the novel suggested by Richardson's 
"Pamela," "The History of the Adventures of Joseph An- 
drews, and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams." In Mr. 
Abraham Adams, Fielding drew, with exquisite humor and a 
healthy sense of what is pure and true, a scholar and a 
Christian, who had external oddities, as absence of mind, 
which might bring him into ridiculous situations, but whom 
nothing could lower in our respect, simply h\ reason of his 
essential purity and truth. Parson Adams was a clergyman 
dignified with the best graces of his office, and in Parson 
Trulliber his opposite was shown. Through Parson Adams, 
Fielding, in his first novel, spoke out of the depths of his 
own heart not seldom, and it is pleasant to find him, in a first 
novel, noticing the character of Richard Steele's work, when 
he makes Parson Adams, in talking of the theatre, say: "I 
never heard of any plays fit for a Christian to read but ' Cato ' 
and ' The Conscious Lovers ; ' and, I must own, in the latter 
there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon." 
Fielding, who was not all himself as an eighteenth century 



576 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1700 

dramatist, quitted the stage in 1743, after the not unmerited 
failure of his comedy, "The Wedding Day." In the same 
year he published three volumes of "Miscellanies." These 
contain some verse, a few essays, — on " Conversation," on 
"Knowledge of the Characters of Men," on "Nothing," — 
and two works of mark, "A Journey from this World to the 
Next," and " The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan 
Wild the Great," a thief-taker who came to be hanged. Field- 
ing's " Jonathan Wild " was written with masterly irony, as 
" an exposition of the motives which actuate the unprincipled 
great in eveiy walk and sphere of life, and which are common 
alike to the thief or murderer on the small scale, and to the 
might}' villain and reckless conqueror who invades the rights 
or destroys the liberties of nations." At this time Fielding 
lost the wife to whom he was devotedly attached. He had 
lost a child but a few months before, and was himself suffering 
much from gout. He wrote a preface for his sister, Sarah 
Fielding, to her clever novel, "The Adventures of David 
Simple ; Containing an Account of his Travels through the 
Cities of London and Westminster, in the Search of a Real 
Friend," published in 1744. She published another, "The 
History of Ophelia," in 1760. 

On the 5th of November, 1745, Fielding began a paper, the 
"True Patriot," to oppose the Jacobitism stirred into activit}^ 
by the Rebellion of that year. The work of Fielding's " True 
Patriot" changed only its form when, in December, 1747, he 
started "The Jacobite Journal; by John Trott-plaid, Esq.," 
to throw cold water of jest and satire upon the 3-et smouldering 
embers of rebellion. This paper appeared every Saturday until 
November, 1748 ; and about that time, by the good offices of 
his friend, George Lyttelton, then Lord of the Treasuiy, Field- 
ing was made a justice of the peace for Middlesex and West- 
minster. In those da}-s such an office had been brought into 
contempt by men like Justice Thrasher, in his " Amelia," who 
had drawn dishonorable profit out of it. Henry Fielding, b}' 
taking the highest view of his dut}', "reduced," as he says, 
" an income of about five hundred pounds a year of the dirtiest 
money upon earth to little more than three hundred pounds, a 



To A.D. 1750.] HENRY FIELDING. 577 

considerable portion of which remained with my clerk ; and, 
indeed ' ' — observe the kindliness of what follows — "if the 
whole had done so, as it ought, he would be but ill paid for 
sitting sixteen in the twent3'-four*in the most unwholesome as 
well as nauseous air in the universe, and which hath in his 
case corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his 
morals." 

In 1749 Fielding published his "Tom Jones." No critic 
has over- praised the skilful construction of the story of " Tom 
Jones ; " but the durability of the work depends on something 
even of more moment than its construction — upon the im- 
perishable character of its material, and on the securit}' with 
which its foundations are laid, deep in the true hearts of Eng- 
lishmen. Fielding's first novel was provoked by an affectation, 
and it was prefaced with a distinct explanation of his own 
"idea of romance." In the first pages of his first novel he 
taught that "the only source of the true ridiculous is affecta- 
tion." His jest was against insincerit}* in all its lighter forms ; 
his power was against untruth. In all his novels, and in " Tom 
Jones" most conspicuously, a generous and penetrating mind, 
familiar with the ways of men, dealt mercifull}' with all honest 
infirmities, sympathized with human goodness, and reserved its 
laughter, or its scorn, only for what was insincere. In " Tom 
Jones ' ' a work was planned upon the ample scale to which 
readers had become accustomed. There was room for a wide 
view of life. The scene was divided fairly between country and 
town. The story was built out of the eternal truths of human 
nature, and was exquisitely polished on its surface with a deli- 
cate and genial humor that suggested rather than preached 
censure on the follies of society in England, not unmixed with 
the directest Christian condemnation against crime. The veiy 
soul of the man enters into the construction of " Tom Jones." 
The picture of a good man, colored b} T Fielding with some of 
the warmth of living friendship for Ralph Allen of Bath, is 
presented at once in Squire Airworthy ; and there is a deep 
seriousness in the manner of presenting him, on a May morn- 
ing, walking upon the terrace before his mansion, with a wide 
prospect around him, planning a generous action, when " in 



578 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700 

the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one 
object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and 
that Mr. All worthy himself presented — a human being replete 
with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render 
himself most acceptable to his Creator, by doing most good to 
His creatures." The two bo} T s bred by Airworthy, Tom Jones 
and Blifil, about whom the whole story revolves, are as the two 
poles of Fielding's mimic world. One of them is eveiybody's 
friend but his own ; the other nobodj-'s friend but his own. 
One is possessed of natural goodness, with all generous im- 
pulses, but with instincts, as we are once or twice distinctly 
reminded, wanting the control of prudence and religion. He 
lies open to frequent heavy blame, and yet more frequent mis- 
construction ; 3'et we have faith in him because he is true, his 
faults are open, his affections warm. We know that time and 
love will make a noble man of him. The other conceals treach- 
ery under a show of righteousness and justice. His fair outside 
of religion and morality, the readiness with which he gives an 
honest coloring to all appearances, are represented wholly with- 
out caricature.. His ill deeds are secret, his affections cold, and 
he is base to us by reason of his falsehood. Appreciation is 
due not only to the sterling English in which this book is 
written, and the keen but generous insight into human char- 
acter that animates every page, but also to its brave morality. 
Scenes of incontinence, which the corrupt manners of his age 
permitted Fielding to include among his pictures of the life 
about him, were not presented as jests by their author. Field- 
ing differs in this, as in man}- things, essentially from Smollett, 
that in his novels he has never used an unclean image for its 
own sake as provocative of mirth in ruder minds. In Field- 
ing's page evil is evil. In " Tom Jones," Airworthy delivers 
no mock exhortations ; whenever Jones has gone astra}', the 
purity of Sophia follows next upon the scene, a higher happi- 
ness is lost, and his true love is removed farther from his reach. 
At last the 3-outh is made to assent to Sophia, when she replies, 
very gravely, upon his pleading of the grossness of his sex, 
the delicacy of hers, and the absence of love in amour: "I 
will never marry a man who shall not learn refinement enough 



To A.D. 1750.] HEXRY FIELDING. 579 

to be as incapable as I am myself of making such a distinc- 
tion." 

The episodes of the book are as true limbs of it. It is not 
merely variety that the} T supply : it is completeness. It is true 
that the Man of the Hill's stor} T is not a part of the direct 
mechanism of the plot ; but it is equally true that it is a vital 
part of the whole epic history. Only by episode could there 
have been interpolated between Jones's generous and Blifil's 
ungenerous principle of intercourse with other men the picture 
of one who has wholly withdrawn himself from human inter- 
course, and dares to solve the question of life's duties b}* look- 
ing from afar with scorn upon his fellows. 

It is a minor excellence that this part of the work has been 
contrived also to supply to the large stud}' of English life those 
chapters, excluded from the main action of the tale by the 
peculiar education and the characters of Jones and Blifil, which 
paint the follies of youth at the universit}" and the life of the 
gambler. Partridge once breaks upon the narrative of the Man 
of the Hill with a characteristic story of his own, in which 
Fielding commands wise reflection on the undefended state of 
criminals tried for their lives. 

In June, 1749, Henry Fielding, who had been elected by the 
Middlesex magistrates their Chairman of the Sessions, delivered 
a i ' Charge to the Grand Jury ' ' touching seriously upon many 
faults in the condition of society; and in January, 1751, he 
published ' l An Inquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of 
Robbers, etc. ; with some Proposals for Remedying the Grow- 
ing Evil," in which he urged the checking of intemperance, and 
denounced the new vice of gin-drinking. This led to an Act 
of Parliament that placed restrictions on the sale of spirits. It 
was also in the }*ear 1751 that Fielding, aged forty-four, pub- 
lished his "Amelia." For "Tom Jones" the publisher had 
paid a hundred pounds be}ond the stipulated price of six hun- 
dred pounds. For "Amelia" he paid a thousand pounds. 
Thus, b} T the middle of the eighteenth century, Richardson and 
Fielding (with Smollett for new ally) , had destroyed the faith 
in royal Arcadians, had carried a large bod} T of the people on 
from reading of short papers to the reading of substantial 



580 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1700. 

works of fiction that dealt with the life they knew and eared 
for, and had made the novel of real life a great recognized 
power. French classicism was decaying, and there was no in- 
fluence above that of the main body of the people influencing 
the form of our best literature. Fielding's "Amelia." dedi- 
cated to his kind friend Ralph Allen, of Bath, has for its theme 
the beauty of true womanhood. He constantly identified his 
first wife with Amelia, while condemning often his own failings 
in the character of her husband, Mr. Booth. Fielding dealt 
also in his novel with, those evils of society against which he 
had been contending, and brought pathos and sharp satire in 
his jail scenes against what were in his day the iniquities of 
criminal law. 

On the 4th of January. 1752. Fielding began '•' The Covent 
Garden Journal ; by Sir Alexander Drawcansir. Knight. Censor 
of Great Britain," which lasted until the end of the year. His 
health was still failing, but he staid in London to complete 
the breaking up of an organized gang of street ruffians : took*, 
morning and evening, half a pint of the tar-water recommended 
by Bishop Berkeley's "Siris;" and. when hope of life was 
gone, left England with his wife and eldest daughter for Lisbon. 
"The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon" was Fielding's last 
work. He arrived in the middle of August, and died, aged 
forty-seven, on the 8th of the following October, 1754. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY. 



NOVELISTS 

Tobias Smollett. 
Laurence Sterne. 
David Hume. 
William Robertson. 
Edward Gibbon. 
Oliver Goldsmith. 
Hannah More. 



AND HISTORIANS. 

Henry Mackenzie. 
Frances Burney. 
Sophia Lee. 
Harriet Lee. 
William Beckford. 
Clara Reeve. 
Ann Radcliffe. 



BIOGRAPHERS, ESSAYISTS, AND CRITICS. 



Joseph Warton. 
Thomas Warton. 
Horace Walpole. 
Lady Mary Montague. 
Samuel Johnson. 
Earl of Chesterfield. 



James Boswell. 
Thomas Percy. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
Edmund Malone. 
Anna Seward. 



WRITERS ON THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, 
SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND LAW. 



Richard Hurd. 

Thomas Reid. 

Adam Smith. 

Sir William Blackstone. 

Edmund Burke. 

Gilbert White. 



William Paley. 
Joseph Priestley. 
Thomas Paine. 
Mary Wollstonecraft 
Godwin. 



Samuel Johnson. 
Mark Akenside. 
Thomas Gray. 
Oliver Goldsmith. 
Thomas Chatterton. 
Charles Churchill. 
James Grainger. 
William Falconer. 
James Beattie. 



POETS. 

James Macpherson. 
William Cowper. 
Robert Burns. 
Erasmus Darwin. 
Elizabeth Carter. 
John Wolcot. 
Anna Laetitia Barbauld. 
Henry James Pye. 
James Grahame. 



Samuel Foote. 

David Garrick. 

George Colman. 

Richard Cumberland. 

John Home. 

Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 



DRAMATISTS. 

Oliver Goldsmith. 
Samuel Johnson. 
Elizabeth Inchbald. 
Hannah Cowley. 
Charles Dibdin. 
Thomas Dibdin. 



CHAPTER XV". 

SECOND HALF OF THE EIG-HTEENTH CENTURY: 

HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS, ESSAYISTS, 

NOVELISTS, AND PHILOSOPHERS. 

1. Tobias Smollett. — 2. Laurence Sterne. — 3. Joseph Warton ; Thomas Warton. — 
4. Richard Hurd. — 5. Horace Walpole; Lady Mary Montague. — 6. Samuel 
Johnson. — 7. David Hume. — 8. William Robertson; Edward Gibbon. — 9. 
Thomas Reid. — 10. Adam Smith; Sir William Blackstone. — 11. Edmund 
Burke. — 12. William Paley. — 13. Joseph Priestley; Thomas Paine; Mary 
Wollstonecraft Godwin. — 14. Sir Joshua Reynolds; Gilbert White; Edmund 
Malone; Anna Seward; Hannah More; Henry Mackenzie; Frances Burney; 
Sophia and Harriet Lee; William Beckford; Clara Reeve; Ann Radcliffe. 

1. Tobias Smollett, born in 1721, in the parish of Car- 
dross, was left dependent on his grandfather, Sir James Smol- 
lett, of Bonhill, was sent to school at Dumbarton, where he 
wrote satirical verse, and a poem on Wallace, went from Dam- 
barton to Glasgow, where he* studied medicine and was appren- 
ticed to a surgeon, the Potion of his first novel. He came to 
London with a tragedy, " The Regicide," written before he 
was eighteen. It was rejected b}' managers, but several years 
afterwards was published with a preface. In 1741, when 
"Pamela" was a new book, Smollett, aged tweiury, was sur- 
geon's mate on board a ship of the line, and sailed in the 
expedition to Carthagena. This experience of life was also 
used as material for his first novel. He quitted the service 
when in the West Indies, lived some time in Jamaica, and 
met the lady whom he afterwards married. He was back in 
London in 1746, and then published anonymously " The Tears 
of Scotland," expressing from his heart, though no Jacobite, 
his just indignation at the cruelties that disgraced the sup- 
pression of the Rebellion of 1745; also "Advice," a satire 
which gave offence. He wrote " Alceste," an opera, for Co vent 
Garden, quarrelled with the manager, published in 1747 "Re- 
proof," a sequel to "Advice," married, and produced in 1748, 

583 



584 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

when his age was twenty-seven, his first novel, "The Adven- 
tures of Roderick Random." This work, written in the form 
of autobiography, was a bright ston T , rich in mirth and a quick 
sense of outside character, that painted life as Smollett had 
seen it, blending his own experiences with his fiction. It 
became immediate^* popular, and helped much in establishing 
the new form of fiction in which writers dealt immediately 
with the life of their own time, and the experience in it of 
common men and women. 

In 1750 he graduated as physician, at Marischal College, 
Aberdeen, but was a doctor with few patients. In the summer 
of 1750 he visited Paris, and probabi}' wrote there his " Pere- 
grine Pickle," published in 1751. Its brightness, and the 
hearty fun of man}' of its chapters, like that which describes 
an entertainment in the manner of the ancients, made the book 
widely popular, and Smollett famous. This book was followed, 
in 1753, by a stud}' of depravity in an adventurer chosen from 
the purlieus of treacheiy and fraud, the " Adventures of Ferdi- 
nand Count Fathom." In 1755 he published a free translation 
of "Don Quixote," then visited his mother and friends in 
Scotland, and, when he came back; accepted the invitation of 
booksellers to edit the "Critical Review," set up in 1756, to 
oppose the Whig " Monthly Review," that had been started 
in 1749. Smollett was genial, but irritable, and now submitted 
himself to vexation by the irritable race of the small authors. 
At this time Smollett began ' ' A complete History of England, 
deduced from the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Treat}' of 
Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748, containing the Transactions of One 
Thousand Eight Hundred and Three Years." He is said to 
have written it in fourteen months. It was published in four 
volumes in 1757-58, and reprinted afterwards in numbers, 
extending to eleven volumes, with a weekly sale of twelve 
thousand. For a paragraph in the "Critical Review" Smollett 
was fined a hundred pounds, and imprisoned for three months, 
at the suit of Admiral Knowles, and worked in prison at " The 
Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves," an imitation of Cer- 
vantes, published in the "British Magazine" in 1760 and 
1761. Smollett then worked at the " Continuation of the His- 



To A.D. 1800.] LAURENCE STERNE. 585 

tory of England " to 1765, published in 17G9, in two volumes. 
After the. loss of his only child, Smollett had travelled for 
health, and in 1766 he published his "Travels through France 
and Italy." In 1769 appeared his " Adventures of an Atom," 
dealing, under Japanese names, with English politics, from 
1754 to 1768. In 1770 he went to Italy with broken health, 
and while there published, only a few months before his death, 
his last, and perhaps his best novel, " The Expedition of Hum- 
phrey Clinker." Smollett died, at the age of fifty, near Leg- 
horn, in October, 1771. 

2. Laurence Sterne (b. 1713, d. 1768), grandson of 
Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York, and son of Lieutenant 
Sterne in a marching regiment, was born at Clonmel barracks. 
After education at Halifax in Yorkshire, and at Jesus College, 
Cambridge, he obtained, in 1738, the vicarage of Sutton, near 
York, and in 1741 a prebend in York Minster, with a house 
in Stonegate. In that year Sterne married. The first two 
volumes of "Tristram Shandy " were published at York, in 
December, 1759, witty and whimsical, suiting the spirit of the 
time in their defiance of convention, and sometimes of decency. 
Their success brought Sterne to London, and he thenceforth 
weakly sacrificed himself to the shallow flatteries of London 
society. The second edition of this part of "Tristram 
Shandy" was followed at once by two volumes of the " Ser- 
mons of Mr. Yorick." Oliver Goldsmith, in his "Citizen of 
the World," condemned Sterne's affectations of freedom in 
dashes and breaks, with the worst license of indelicacy, and 
was so far displeased by the superficial tricks of the book 
that he was unjust to the true genius of the writer, and missed 
the charm of his Uncle Tobj- and Corporal Trim. In 1761 
appeared the third and fourth volumes of " Tristram Shandy ; " 
in 1762, the fifth and sixth; in 1765, the seventh and eighth; 
in 1767, the ninth and last. In 1768, after a visit to France 
and Italy, appeared Sterne's " Sentimental Journey," of which 
the style reminds us that 1761 and 1762 were the dates of the 
chief sentimental writings of Rousseau. In the same year 
Sterne died, on the 13th of September, at lodgings in Bond 
Street, with no friend near ; the onlv sign of human affection 



586 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

the knock of a footman, sent by some of his grand friends 
from a neighboring dinner-party to learn how Mr. Sterne was. 
A single mourning-coach, with two gentlemen inside, one of 
them his publisher, followed his body to the grave. It was dug 
up after burial, and recognized in a few daj's on the table of 
the Professor of Anatomy of Cambridge. Sterne left no pro- 
vision for his widow and daughter at York, but died in debt, 
and his family were aided by a collection made at the next 
York races, His daughter, Lydia, married a Frenchman, and 
is said to have been among the victims of the French Ee vo- 
lution. 

3. Joseph Warton, born in 1722, son of an Oxford professor of 
poetry, was educated at Winchester School and at Oxford. He wrote 
verse; went to France, in 1751, as companion to the Duke of Bolton, 
having previously obtained from him the Rectory of Wynslade, to which 
that of Tunworth afterwards was added. In 1755 he became second 
master of Winchester School, and was head master from 1766 to 1793. 
He published, in 1756, an " Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope," 
to which a second volume was added in 1782. In his latter days he had 
more church preferment, and he died in 1800. His brother, Thomas 
Warton, six years younger, was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, 
wrote poems, and, in 1753, aided the reviving taste for our best litera- 
ture by critical " Observations on the Faery Queen of Spenser." In 
1757 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford for ten years; and, 
in 1774, produced the first volume of his " History of English Poetry," 
followed by a second volume in 1778, a third volume in 1781, and later 
a fragment of the fourth volume. Thomas Warton succeeded William 
Whitehead as poet-laureate, in 1785; published in that year Milton's 
Minor Poems, with notes; and died in 1790. 

4. Richard Hurd, born in 1720, who became Bishop of Lichfield and 
Coventry in 1775, and died in 1808, was a friend of Warburton; and, 
among other works, wrote, between 1758 and 1764, his " Dialogues 
Moral and Political," and "Letters on Chivalry and Romance." 

5. Horace Walpole, born in 1717, had a large income from posts 
given him by Sir Robert, his father. He entered Parliament in 1741, 
but seldom spoke, though for many years a member. In 1747 he bought 
the estate of Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, and lavished money 
upon its adornment. There he set up a printing-press, from which, in 
1757, Gray's odes on " The Bard," and "The Progress of Poesy," were 
the first works issued. In 1791 he became Earl of Orford, and he died 
in 1797. His chief works were "A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble 
Authors of England" (1758); "Anecdotes of Painting in England, 
with some accounts of the principal artists," by George Vertue, digested 



ToA.P. iSoo.j SAMUEL JOHNSON. 587 

from his MSS. (1762-71); " The Castle of Otranto," a romance, pub- 
lished in 1765; and "Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King 
Richard the Third" (1768). Publications of Horace Walpole's "Let- 
ters " began to appear in 1818, and were finally arranged in nine volumes 
in 1857. The small talk of their time is also illustrated by the letters 
of Lady Mary Montague, born in 1690, eldest daughter of Evelyn 
Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston. She married, in 1712, Addison's friend, 
Edward Wortley Montague, went with him, in 1716, to Constantinople, 
and after their return lived near Pope, at Twickenham. In 1739 Lady 
Mary left her husband and connections, to live abroad, and did not 
return to England for twenty years. She was in Venice when her 
husband, with whom she had corresponded, died in 1761. She came 
home in January; and died in August, 1762. There was. in the follow- 
ing year, an unauthorized publication of her letters. Her letters, with 
her poems and essays, were published in 1837, edited by Lord Wharn- 
cliffe. 

6. Samuel Johnson was born on the 18th of September, 
1709. His father was a bookseller at Lichfield, and he was 
named Samuel, as godson of a friendly lodger in the house, Dr. 
Samuel Swinfen. He was born scrofulous, and as in his earliest 
days the Tory part}' was re-asserting the doctrine of Divine 
right, by reviving in the person of Queen Anne the pretence to 
cure scrofula, therefore called " king's evil," b}* touch of a ro}'al 
hand, he was taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne. 
The disease remained, and it was part of the hard work of 
Johnson's life to battle with it. In 1716, at the age of seven, 
he was sent to Lichfield Grammar School; and in 1724, aged 
fifteen, to a school at Stourbridge, as assistant pupil. In 1726 
he came home for two 3-ears, and in October, 1728, went, hy 
Dr. Swinfen's advice, and with some assistance from him, to 
Pembroke College, Dr. Swinfen's own college, at Oxford. 
There the hypochondriacal oppression of the brain, to which 
he had been subject, increased. Johnson's scrofulous consti- 
tution made itself felt by him chiefly in the brain, and might 
have reduced another man to the insanity of which he never 
lost the dread. He feared it at college, and wrote in Latin 
for Dr. Swinfen an account of his sjniptoms. Dr. Swinfen, 
proud of the Latin, and forgetting that Johnson was revealing 
to him a very secret dread, showed the report to others, and 
made Johnson less willing to accept help from him. Johnson 



588 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

remained at Oxford from the 31st of October, 1728, to the 
autumn of 1731. His father died in the latter } T ear. Johnson 
received twenty pounds, all he could hope for from his father's 
effects, laid by eleven guineas of it, and in 1732 went to be 
usher in the school at Market Bosworth. He gave that up 
in a few months, and went to stay with a friend and school- 
fellow, Edmund Hector, who was seeking practice in Birming- 
ham as a surgeon, and lodged at the house of a bookseller. 
For the bookseller Johnson translated, for five guineas, " Father 
Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia," which was published in 1735. 
In 1734 Johnson was at home with his mother, who kept the 
shop at Lichfield, proposing to print the Latin poems of Politian 
b}' subscription. In November of that j T ear he wrote from 
Birmingham to Edward Cave, who in 1731 had established 
"The Gentleman's Magazine," offering to supply it with a 
literary column ; and Cave answered the letter. In Jul}', 1736, 
Johnson married Elizabeth, widow of a Mr. Porter. Her first 
husband, a mercer, had died insolvent. After his marriage 
Johnson set up school in a large house at Edial, near Lichfield. 
He had been refused the mastership of the grammar school at 
Solihull, because it was found, on mquiiy, that he was so inde- 
pendent in spirit that he might ' ' huff the feoffees ; ' ' and ' k y* 
he has such a wa}- of distorting his fface (w h though he can't 
help), }' e gent, think it may affect some young ladds." The 
want of control over his face and gestures sprang from that 
affection of the brain against which Johnson battled through 
life. There came to Johnson's school at Edial only the two 
sons of Captain Garrick, of Lichfield, who had known and 
respected Johnson at home, and one other boy. Here the 
foundation was laid of a lifelong friendship between Johnson 
and David Garrick. The school failed, and in March, 1737, 
Johnson, aged twent3'-eight, and Garrick, aged twent}'-one, 
came to London together, Mrs. Johnson being left at Edial or 
Lichfield, while a new start in life was being looked for. John- 
son, while school-keeping, had begun a tragedy, "Irene." 
Having come to London with Garrick in March, 1737, in July 
he was lodging at Greenwich, to work at his play, and offered 
to translate for Cave a "History of the Council of Trent." 



To A.D. 1800.] SAMUEL JOHNSON. 589 

He went back for three months to Lichfield, where he finished 
"Irene," and then returned to London with his wife, to do 
or die. His tragedy was refused. He looked again to Cave, 
and in March, 1783, appeared his first contribution to "The 
Gentleman's Magazine," Latin verses to Sylvanus Urban. In 
June he began to contribute to the Magazine " Debates of 
the Senate of Lilliput." Report of proceedings in the English 
Parliament was unlawful ; but a Mr. William Guthrie at first 
provided Johnson with accounts of them, which he worked up 
in his own way. These became famous, and were dropped by 
Johnson when in full success, because the}^ were accepted as 
faithful reports, and he would not be even indirectly part} r to a 
fraud. In May of 1738 appeared Johnson's first poem, his 
" London," a poem in imitation of the third satire of Juvenal, 
for which Dodsle}' gave ten pounds. It expressed the depth of 
Johnson's feeling as a lonely struggler in the great city, and 
had printed in capitals one line : 

" This mournful truth is everywhere confessed; 
Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." 

It was in a second edition within a week. Pope caused 
inquiry to be made for the author, and recommended him to the 
good offices of Lord Gower, who would have made him master 
of a grammar school at Appleby, in Leicestershire, with a sala- 
ry of about sixty pounds a year ; but the degree of M.A. was 
a necessary qualification. This was asked in vain for the author 
of " London " from his own university at Oxford, and also from 
Dublin. In the following year, 1739, Johnson, aged thirty, 
received advances from Cave, as small as half a crown, for 
work to be done. One letter was signed " Yours impransus " 
— without a breakfast ; for Johnson sturdily sought to pay his 
waj T , and ate or hungered as his means required. As a good 
Tory he published this } T ear a small satirical pamphlet, " Mar- 
mor Norfolciense ; or, an Essa} 7 on an Ancient Prophetical 
Inscription in monkish rlryme, lately discovered near Lynn, 
in Norfolk, by Probus Britannicus." The next four years were 
years of work and poverty. In 1744 he was still struggling, 
and it was at this time that he published his " Life of Savage," 
who had died in 1743. 



590 MANUAL OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

In 1745. Johnson published "Miscellaneous Observations on 
the Tragedy of Macbeth, with Remarks on Sir Thomas Han- 
mer's Edition of Shakespeare," to which he added proposals 
for a new edition of Shakespeare. In 1747 his friend Garrick 
opened Drmy Lane, and turned at once to Johnson for the 
opening prologue. In the same year Johnson issued "The 
Plan of an English Dictionary," addressed to Lord Chester- 
field. In 1748 he wrote " The Vanity of Human Wishes." 
chiefly at Hampstead, where his wife was staying for her 
health; and in 1749, the year of the publication of "Tom 
Jones," Garrick, as patentee of Dnny Lane, brought out John- 
son's "Irene," and, though it was not successful, forced its 
ran for nine nights, that Johnson might not lose his three 
author's nights. They brought him in £195 17s., besides a 
hundred pounds from Dodsley for the copyright. In the same 
year Dodsley gave but fifteen pounds for Johnson's second 
poem, published in May. tk The Vanity of Human Wishes," 
which has in it. like "London," depths of feeling stirred b}' 
a long conflict with adversity. 

In 17.30 Johnson began the "Rambler" on the 20th of 
March, and continued it every Tuesday and Saturday till its 
close, on the 17th of March, 1752, about a fortnight before the 
death of his wife. The deeply religious nature of Johnson 
animated his work in joining himself to the number of those 
who had followed the track of the " Tatler " and " Spectator." 
The Latin style of the "Rambler." and its studied avoidance 
of common words, represented only a full working out of the 
fashionable theory of the time, derived from France. Johnson 
did for the style of his own day what Lyiy had done in his time, 
and identified his name with it. But he lived on and partially 
outgrew it, as his neighbors did ; so that the stjde of his " Lives 
of the Poets" differs greatly from that of the '* Rambler." 
His wife's death left Johnson with none but his old mother at 
Lichfield dependent on him. In 1754 Cave died with his hand 
in Johnson's, and Johnson wrote his life for the next number 
of the "Gentleman's Magazine." To the "Adventurer," a 
series of a hundred and forty papers, issued between Nov. 7, 
1752, and March 9, 1754. by his friend, Dr. John Hawkes- 



To A.D. 1800.] SAMUEL JOHNSON. 591 

worth, Johnson contributed. In the " World," by Adam 
Fitzadam, a series of essa}*s in two hundred and ten numbers, 
published between January, 1753, and December, 1756, the 
Earl of Chesterfield — Philip Dormer Stanhope (b. 1694, d. 
1773), whose " Letters to his Son" were published the 3-ear 
after his death — praised Johnson's "Dictionary/' Chester- 
field's two letters appeared in the "World" just before the 
"Dictionary" came out, and on the 7th of February, 1755, 
Johnson addressed a letter to him, repudiating the patronage 
of one to whom seven 3'ears before he had looked for aid, and 
who during his seven years of labor against difficulties had not 
given him one word of encouragement or one smile of favor. 
In 1755, his "Dictionary" appeared. To supply letters after 
his name upon the title-page, for satisfaction of the booksellers, 
Oxford had now conceded to Johnson the degree of M.A., and 
Dublin spontaneously added that of LL.D. Johnson received 
for the " Dictionaiy " in all fifteen hundred and sevent3 r -five 
pounds, which was payment at the rate of two hundred and 
twenty-five pounds a year while it was in progress, out of which 
he had to buy books for reference, and pay six amanuenses. 
He was so poor that in March next year he was arrested for a 
debt of £5 18s., and was helped 03- Samuel Richardson. To 
avoid debt, he did aii3' honest work — wrote sermons for clergy- 
men, and prefaces for authors. It was at this time that he 
issued new "Proposals" for his edition of Shakespeare. In 
April, 1758, he began the " Idler," a weekly essa3 T in the 
"Universal Chronicle," continued for two years. In 1759 his 
mother died, at the age of ninet3'. His poverty had kept him 
from her, because he could not spare from his aid to her the 
mone}' it would cost to go to and from Lichfield. There were 
her little debts to pa}', and there would be the funeral expenses. 
To provide these he wrote his moral tale of " Rasselas," for 
which he was paid a hundred pounds; with twent3'-five pounds 
afterwards for a second edition. Johnson had now neither wife 
nor mother to support, and the " Idler " was discontinued in 
April, 1760. In 1762 his influential friends obtained for him, 
from Lord Bute, a grant of three hundred pounds a year. 
It required courage to tell him that the3' had done so. In his 



592 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

" Dictionary," as in all works of his, he had set the mark of his 
mind. Its religious spirit was in his careful choice of illustra- 
tive extracts, which should be in themselves worth reading, and 
tempt nobodj T to read a book that he believed could be injurious. 
Its spirit of independence broke out in some of his definitions, 
and he had defined Pension, "An allowance made to an}" one 
without an equivalent;" Pensioner, "A slave of state, hired 
by a stipend to obe} r his master." When told of the grant of 
a pension to himself, and assured that this was not said to him 
in joke, he remained silent for a time, and then assented. His 
after-course of life showed that he had resolved to take this 
part of the money usually wasted on unworthy men, not for 
his own enrichment, but in trust for those whom it could re- 
lieve from unmerited suffering. He always carried money for 
occasional charities, and he had, in Bolt Court, these house 
companions, rescued from distress ; — Robert Levet, an awkward 
and helpless surgeon to the poor, had shown his need of a pro- 
tector, and for the last thiily years of his life found shelter under 
Johnson's roof. Miss Williams, a friend of his wife's, daughter 
of a Welsh doctor, who ruined himself, had, in Mrs. Johnson's 
time, come to "London for an operation on her eye. She became 
blind. Poor creature ! Johnson must take care of her. She 
stuttered, and had a vile temper. Johnson bribed the maid to 
bear with that by the addition of half a crown a week to her 
wages. Mrs. Desmoulins ; for her claim it was enough that 
she was Dr. Swinfen's daughter, now the widow of a writing- 
master, and in want. Another of his pensioners and hearth- 
sharers was Miss Carmichael ; another, a negro, Francis 
Barber, whom Johnson took when his old master, Dr. Bathurst, 
had been unable to support him. Disdainful of so poor a bar 
to human fellowship as color of the skin, Johnson treated 
this negro servant with friendship, was at some cost to educate 
him, and addressed him in letters as "Dear Francis," signing 
himself "Affectionately yours." Johnson lived among these 
people as their friend, not as their benefactor, and did not affect 
patronage. "No man," said Mrs. Thrale, "loved the poor 
like Dr. Johnson." His outside rudeness covered the ten- 
derest heart. His own experience of povert} T quickened his 



To A.D. 1800.] SAVUEL JOHXSON. 593 

sympathies, while it roughened his spirit of independence. 
Wk He had nothing of the bear but his skin," said Garrick. 

It was not till 1763 that James B OS well (b. 1740, d. 1795), 
then a young man of twent}*-three, first saw Dr. Johnson in the 
back-parlor of Thomas Davies, actor, bookseller, and author of 
some useful books upon the stage. Boswell had studied law in 
Scotland, and was afterwards called to the English bar. His 
minute chronicling, thenceforth, of Johnson's sayings and doings 
is made interesting by a rare vigor of thought in the man whose 
common talk is thus recorded. Such hero-worship as Boswell's 
has its weak side, but there was no meanness or self-seeking in 
the young gentleman's choice of an object of reverence. Bos- 
well's " Life of Johnson " was first published in 1791, seven 
years after Johnson's death. Mrs. Thrale, who, before she 
married the rich brewer, had been a lively Welsh girl — Miss 
Hester Salusbury — first met Johnson in 1764, when he was 
brought to her house at Streatham to meet a poetical shoemaker 
named Woodhouse who was then being talked about. He soon 
became the most honored friend of the house, and the centre 
of attention at Mrs. Thrale's literary parties. In 1765 John- 
son's mind suffered so much that he wrote in his diar} T on Easter 
da}': " My memory grows confused, and I know not how the 
days pass over me. Good Lord deliver me! " In that year 
his edition of Shakespeare appeared, and he wrote to Joseph 
Warton, that, as he felt no solicitude about the work, he felt no 
comfort from its conclusion. In 1766 he was confined to his 
rooms for weeks together, and declared himself on the verge of 
insanity. His failing health had obliged him to feel that he 
was himself benefited bj T his pension ; and as he resolved that 
he would not take the benefit without giving an equivalent, he 
began to write political pamphlets. His first, in 1770, was 
called "The False Alarm," on the commotion caused b}' the 
expulsion of Wilkes from the House of Commons. In 1775 
he published " Taxation no Tyranny," — a vehement pamphlet 
in opposition to all efforts in England for conciliating the 
American Colonies. He had paid a visit to the Hebrides, antl 
described it in the 3-ear before he wrote his pamphlet on the 
American question. In 1777, when he was sixty-eight years 



59-1: MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1750 

old, the booksellers asked him to write lives of the poets since 
the Commonwealth, to be prefixed to new editions of their 
works in a series of volumes. The "Lives of the English 
Poets" appeared in 1779-81, and represent the clearness of 
Johnson's critical power, and the natural force of his style in 
later life. He had his own strong predilections, and was him- 
self in his judgments, but he tried honestly to be fair. " They 
will ask you to write the life of some dunce," Boswell, said 
" will 3-0U do that, sir? " " Yes, and say he was a dunce." 
When Johnson was asked to name his own price for his work, 
he fixed it at two hundred pounds ; the publishers gave more, 
but still much less than the work was worth. Johnson, true to 
his own maxim, " I hate a complainer," was thoroughly con- 
tent. " It is not," he said, " that the} T gave me too little, but 
that I wrote too much." In 1782 his friend Levet died. In 
1783 his friend Mrs. Williams died, and he had a stroke of palsy. 
In 1784 he died himself. Opium was given to him in his last 
illness to relieve pain ; he asked if it could restore health, and 
being told that it could not, said, " Then I will take no more, 
for I wish to meet my God with an unclouded mind." The 
dread of loss of intellect remained to the last. He turned his 
pikers into Latin to assure himself that he was still master of 
his faculties. On the 13th of December he whispered to a 
3'oung lad}' who had come to beg his blessing, " God bless } t ou, 
my dear ! " and fell into a quiet sleep. In that sleep God took 
the soul of a true servant, who had lived in his own different 
way, like Milton, as ever in his great Task-Master's e}'e. 

7. David Hume was born in 1711, of a good Scottish 
family. His father died when he was young. His mother 
bred him to the law, but he cared most for literature. In 
1734, at the age of twenty -three, he was sent to Bristol with 
letters to merchants. Proving unfit for commerce, he went to 
France to economize and write. In 1739 he published the 
first two Books of his "Treatise of Human Nature," written 
in France. He published the third Book in 1740. In 1741-42 
h% published at Edinburgh, " Essa}'S, Moral, Political, and 
Literary," in which he discussed politics as a science, super- 
stition and enthusiasm, civil liberty, national characters, the 



To A. D. 1 8oo.] DAVID HUME. 595 

rise of arts and sciences. Among studies of different solu- 
tions of the social problem, Hume expressed inclination rather 
to dispute than to assent to the conclusions of the philosophers. 
He upheld the dignity of human nature, and held "that the 
sentiments of those who are inclined to think favorably of 
mankind are much more advantageous to virtue than the con- 
trary' principles, which give us a mean opinion of our nature." 
In 1745 Hume, aged thirty-four, came to England to live with 
the young Marquis of Annandale, who was weak in mind and 
bod}-. In the following year General St. Clair appointed him 
his secretary in an expedition to Canada, but the expedition 
was not made. In 1748 he was with St. Clair on a military 
embassy to Vienna and Turin. He recast his first part of 
the treatise concerning Human Nature, and it was published 
in 1748 while he was abroad, as "An Enquiry concerning 
Human Understanding." In 1749 and 1750 Hume was in 
Scotland with his brother in the country, writing. In 1751 he 
removed to Edinburgh, and published there in 1752 his " Politi- 
cal Discourses," which was well received. In the previous 
year he had published in London, with less success, an " En- 
quiry concerning the Principles of Morals," which he consid- 
ered to be his best work. In 1752 he was made Librarian to 
the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh, and had an access to 
books which suggested the writing of his Histoiy. The first 
section appeared in 1754, as a "Histoiy of Great Britain," 
containing the reigns of James I. and Charles I., in a quarto 
volume, which was decried and neglected. There were only 
forty-five copies sold in a twelvemonth. In 1757 Hume pub- 
lished his " Natural Histoiy of Religion," and in 1756 a con- 
tinuation of his "Histoiy," from the death of Charles I. to 
the Revolution. This was better received. He then went 
back in time, and published, in 1759, the " History of England 
under the House of Tudor," which was clamored against; and 
in 1761-62 he went back to a still earlier time, and completed- 
his ' ' Histoiy of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar 
to the Revolution in 1688." Smollett's History, from that 
date to the death of George II., is usually printed as a con- 
tinuation of Hume. As a philosopher, Hume denied miracle, 



596 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

and drew from Locke's doctrine, that knowledge comes to us 
only from the outside world, an argument that the experience 
we reason from is based only on custom, without assurance that 
we see cause and effect. Our notion of necessity, he said, rests 
only on the association of ideas. From a combination of 
swiftly-succeeding ideas which arise from and cease with move- 
ments of the body, we form, Hume argued, an imaginary entity 
which we call the soul, and assign to it. immortality. In 1763 
Hume went with the Earl of Hertford, who was ambassador, 
to Paris, became secretary to the embassy, and remained in 
Paris as charge-d' affaires till 1766, when he returned to Eng- 
land. He brought with him Rousseau, who was made much 
of in England, and pensioned by George III. Hume, between 
1767 and 1769, was an under-secretary of state. In 1769 he 
retired to Edinburgh, possessed of a thousand a }~ear, and 
died in 1776, aged sixty-five. 

8. William Robertson (b. 1721, d. 1793) was a popular 
pulpit orator, who published, in 1759, a "History of Scotland, 
during the Reigns of Mary and of King James VI., till his 
Accession to the Throne of England," a work of labor and 
pains rather than of genius, and written with artificial dignity. 
It went through fourteen editions in his lifetime. In 1760 
Robertson was made King's Chaplain; in 1762, Principal of 
the Edinburgh University ; and, in 1764, Historiographer Ro}'al 
for Scotland, a post revived for him, with a salary of two 
hundred pounds a } T ear. In 1769 he published a " Histoiy of 
the Reign of the Emperor Charles V., with a .View of the 
Progress of Societ}' in Europe from the subversion of the 
Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth century ; " 
and, in 1777, a "Histoiy of America." Robertson had the 
natural insight of good sense with patient industry, but none 
of Hume's freshness of thought ; and his Latin style wants the 
wealth of mind and richness of expression that gives life to the 
pomp of a Latin -style in Edward Gibbon (b. 1737, d. 1794), 
the first volume of whose "Histoiy of the Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire" appeared, when its author was thirty- 
nine years old, in 1776, the year of the death of David Hume. 
Gibbon had been a delicate child, and had been educated chiefly 



ToA.D. 1800.] EDMUND BURKE. 597 

at private schools before he went to Magdalene College, Ox- 
ford. When he had been there fourteen months he turned 
Romanist, and to wean him from his new opinions his father 
placed him under a Calvinist minister at Lausanne, D3- whom 
he was reconverted. In 1758, aged twenty-one, he returned to 
England; in 1761 he published, in French, his " Essai sur 
rfetude de la Litterature." In 1763 he travelled through 
France and Switzerland to Italy, and in 1764, aged twenty- 
seven, when musing among the ruins of the capital, it first 
occurred to him to write a histoiy of the decline and fall of the 
great Roman Empire. In 1770 Gibbon was thirty-three years 
old, and the death of his father gave him property. He was 
in Parliament for eight years after 1774, finished his histoiy at 
Lausanne, and published the close of it on his birthday in 1788. 
After his death, his miscellaneous writings were published, the 
best of them being tw Memoirs of my Life and Writings." 

9. Thomas Reid (b. 1710, d. 1796), a Scottish clergyman, who be- 
came, in 1752, Professor of Moral Philosophy at King's College, Aber- 
deen, was the first who attempted a philosophical answer to Hume's 
scepticism. This was by his "Inquiry into the Human Mind," which 
appeared in 1764, and was submitted to Hume's friendly criticism before 
publication. Reid's "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man," in 
1785, and " Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind," in 1788, 
completed an argument which Reid sought to pursue by Bacon's method 
of investigation, carefully distinguishing between observation and re- 
flection, while he endeavored to vindicate against attacks of scepticism 
those fundamental laws of belief which base human knowledge upon 
what Reid called the common sense of mankind. 

10. Adam Smith (b. at Kirkcaldy in 1723, d. 1790) was from 1752 to 
1763 Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and published, in 1759, 
his "Theory of Moral Sentiments;" but his " Inquiry into the Nature 
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" did not appear till 1776. This 
famous book developed Locke's doctrine, that labor is the source of 
wealth. Sir William Blackstone published the first volume of his 
"Commentaries on the Laws of England" in 1765, and finished in 1769. 

11. Edmund Burke, the son of an attorney at Dublin, was 
born probably in 1730, educated first at a famous school kept 
by Abraham Shackleton, a member of the Society of Friends, 
at Ballitore, in Kildare, then at Trinit}' College, Dublin, where 
he was fellow-student with Goldsmith, and graduated as B.A. 



598 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

in 1748, M.A. in 1751. In 1750 he came to study law in Lon- 
don. To aid his means of entering into society he contributed 
to periodicals. In 1756 he published as a satire upon Boling- 
broke, whose works Mallett had published in 1754, and against 
the new turn of thought in France, " A Vindication of Natural 
Society, or a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind 
from every species of Artificial Society. In a letter to Lord 
. . : by a late Noble Writer." This piece of iron}' was fol- 
lowed in the same year by Burke's " Philosophical Inquiry into 
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." This 
continued the form of speculation of which Addison had given 
the first example in his essays on Imagination ; and worked out 
with ingenuity, and eloquence of style, a theoiy that sense of 
beauty is associated with relaxation, terror with contraction, of 
the fibres of the bod}'. Burke's health suffered ; there were 
signs of consumption ; and he was received at Bath into the 
house of an Irish physician, Dr. Nugent, whose daughter he 
married in the latter part of 1756. In 1758 his only son Richard 
was born. Burke resumed work in London, and on Christmas 
Day, 1758, at Garrick's house first dined with Dr. Johnson, 
thenceforth his warm friend. In June, 1759, he started " The 
Annual Register," and was its chief writer and editor for several 
years. In 1761 he was appointed Private Secretary to William 
Gerard Hamilton, then become chief Secretary in Ireland. 
For his help to the Irish Government Burke received in 1763 
a pension of three hundred pounds a year, which he resigned 
when he had held it about two years, because he found it was 
regarded as a pledge of servitude. Burke became one of the 
first members of the literary club founded in 1764 at the Turk's 
Head in Gerrard Street, Soho : Goldsmith and its founders, 
Johnson and Sir Joshua RejTiolds, were among the other mem- 
bers. A Mr. William Fitzherbert was so much impressed b}' 
Burke's powers, as shown at the Turk's Head Club, that he 
recommended him to the Marquis of Rockingham, who became 
Premier in July, 1765, as private secretary. Another of 
Burke's admirers at the same time gave him a seat in Parlia- 
ment for Wendover. Lord Rockingham felt Burke's power, 
and used his counsel in dealing with the American difficulty. 



ToA.D. 1800.] EDMUND BURKE. 599 

Parliament in the beginning of 1764 had voted its right to tax 
the colonies ; it proceeded to tax sugar and other articles of 
colonial import, and passed a Stamp Act which had been pro- 
posed some time before. The American colonies protested 
vigorously, and their first Congress produced a " Declaration 
of the Rights and Grievances of the Colonies " in October, 

1765. Burke, who dreaded revolution in all forms, reverenced 
all old institutions, and was by nature a conservative, advised 
the avoidance of collision b} T a compromise. Great Britain 
should assert the right to tax, but at the same time abstain 
from using it. Accordingly, the Stamp Act was repealed, and 
an Act was passed asserting the legislative power of Great 
Britain. Lord Rockingham's ministry then gave place, in July, 

1766, to that of Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and Burke defended its 
policy in " A Short Account of a Late Short Administration." 
To the liberality of Lord Rockingham, Burke in part owed the 
means of buying in 1768, for twenty-two thousand pounds, the 
estate at Beaconsfield. His heart was set upon founding a 
family ; his hope all rested upon his one son Richard. Burke 
was among those wrongly suspected of authorship of the " Let- 
ters of Junius," which appeared in the u Public Advertiser," 
with bold denunciation of the men in power, between January 
21, 1769, and January 21, 1772, and are now commonly ascribed 
to Sir Philip Francis. His polic} T of conciliation caused Burke 
to be appointed agent for New York, while the English Govern- 
ment was making the breach with the colonies more hopeless. 
In 1770 he published " Thoughts on the Cause of the Present 
Discontents," in which he maintained that government ought to 
be in the hands of an aristocracy. On the 19th of April, 1774, 
he made a famous " Speech on American Taxation," including 
a historj- of the question for the last eleven years. " Again and 
again," he said, " revert to your old principles ; seek peace and 
ensue it. . . .Be content to bind America by laws of trade ; 
}*ou have alwaj's clone it. Let this be your reason for binding 
their trade. Do not burden them b} T taxes ; you were not used 
to do so from the beginning. Let this be your reason for not 
taxing. These are the arguments of states and kingdoms. 
Leave the rest to the schools." In 1774 Burke became mem- 



GOO MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

ber for Bristol, and his colleague, who had to follow him as 
orator 011 the hustings, in thanking the electors, contented him- 
self with, " Gentlemen, I sa}' ditto to Mr. Burke ! ditto to Mr. 
Burke!" On the 22d of March, 1775, Burke laid before the 
House of Commons thirteen resolutions for reconcilement with 
America, and made a famous " Speech on American Concilia- 
tion." After the peace with America made in 1783, Burke 
held office in the coalition ministiy ; and was foremost prose- 
cutor in the seven-years' trial of Warren Hastings, which ended 
with acquittal, in April, 1795. He first expressed in the 
House, in February, 1790, his desire to check the French Revo- 
lution by armed interference. In November, 1790, he published 
his " Reflections on the Revolution in France." This pamphlet 
was answered by Thomas Paine with the first part of ' ' The 
Rights of Man ; " b}* James Mackintosh, afterwards Sir James, 
then a young man, with his " Vindicise Gallicae." In Decem- 
ber, 1791, Burke wrote "Thoughts on French Affairs." In 
1794 occurred the calamity of Burke's life, that crushed all 
his energy. He had lived in his son Richard, then thirty-six 
years old, a barrister, for whom, in 1794, he vacated his seat 
at Malton. .Richard was to outshine his father, who was 
anxious to become Lord Beaconsfield, that he might trans- 
mit the title to his son ; and that his son, uniting himself 
with the aristocracy, might realize his own highest ideal. Be- 
cause it crossed this hope, Burke had forbidden his son's 
marriage to a young lad}* who had lived in the house as com- 
panion to his mother, and whom he loved. Richard obeyed. 
On the 26th of Jul}' there was a dinner-party at Burke's house, 
to celebrate his son's return as member for Malton — father 
and mother alike blind to the fact that he was dying of con- 
sumption. The truth was urged on them. Richard was taken 
to a house at Brompton, and, as he lay there dying, he heard 
his father and mother in loud lament in the next room, rose, 
dressed, and tottered in to them, that he might seem well and 
cheer them. He spoke comfort, heard the rustle of the trees 
outside,' said, "What noise is that — does it rain?" then, see- 
ing what it was, he repeated twice the lines of Milton that his 
father had delighted in : 



To A.D. 1800.] GILBERT WHITE. 601 

" His praise, ye winds, that from four quarters blow, 
Breathe soft or loud ; and wave your tops, ye pines, 
With every plant, in sign of worship wave," 

then bowed his own head in sign of worship, sank into the 
arms of his parents, and died. Burke cared no more to be 
Lord Beaconsfield. He was a broken man for the remaining 
three 3'ears of his life, and died in July, 1797. 

12. William Paley, the son of a clergyman, was born in 
1743, and was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, of 
which he was elected fellow in 17GG. He resided at the uni- 
versity during the next ten years. He received mairy valuable 
positions in the church. He died in 1805. He was an acute 
thinker, and wrote powerful works on morals, politics, and 
theology. The chief of these are the following: ' k The Prin- 
ciples of Moral and Political Philosophy ; " " Horse Paulinas; 
or, the Truth of the Scripture Histor}' of St. Paul evinced b}' a 
comparison of the Epistles which bear his name with the Acts 
of the Apostles, and with one another;" "A View of the 
Evidences of Christianity ; " and " Natural Theology." 

13. Joseph Priestley, born in 1733, became a Dissenting 
minister, and first devoted himself to the stud}' of physical 
science, in which he made man}' important discoveries. He 
subsequently gave great attention to theology and politics ; was 
a defender of the French Revolution ; and in 1794 he removed 
to America, where he died in 1801. His writings on all sub- 
jects include more than sixt} r titles. Thomas Paine, born in 
Norfolk, in 1737, became a staymaker and an exciseman; re- 
moved to America, and by his writings greatly influenced events 
during the American Revolution ; returned to Europe in 1787, 
where he wrote tw The Rights of Man," in reply to Burke, lie 
wrote many political and theological pamphlets. Mary 
Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1759, and published 
in 1792 a bold and radical book, entitled " Vindication of the 
Rights of Woman." 

14. Sir Joshua Reynolds was born in 1723, became the 
most famous artist of his day, and published his " Discourses " 
on Art. Gilbert White (b. 1720, d. 1793) has still great 
reputation as a naturalist, and as a delightful writer, by his 



602 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1750. 

" Natural Histoiy and Antiquities -of Selborne," first published 
in 1789. Edmund Malone (b. 1741, d. 1812) distinguished 
himself as an acute lkerary critic. He published editions of 
Shakespeare and Dry den, and several biographies. Anna 
Seward (b. 1747, d. 1809) wrote verses and a "Life of Dr. 
Darwin; " but is chiefly remembered for her " Letters," pub- 
lished after her death. Hannah More (b. 1745, d. 1833) was 
a prolific and popular writer of dramas, and afterwards of 
religious and moralizing works, especially in the form of stories. 
Her most noted books are " The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," 
" Practical Piety," and " Ccelebs in Search of a Wife." Henry 
Mackenzie (b. 1745, d. 1831) wrote plays, essays, and novels. 
His most successful novels are " The Man of Feeling," 1771 ; 
" The Man of the World," 1773 ; and "Julia de Roubigne," 
1777. Frances Burney, or Madame D'Arblay (b. 1752, 
d. 1840), wrote several famous novels, — "Evelina," "Ce- 
cilia," and " Camilla." The sisters Sophia and Harriet Lee 
were once popular story- writers, their joint work, " The Can- 
terbury Tales " (five vols., 1797-1805), having still a wide diffu- 
sion among children. A celebrated romance entitled " Vathek " 
was published in 1784 by "William Beckford (b. 1760, 
d. 1844). Clara Reeve (b. 1725, d. 1803) wrote several 
novels, of which the most notable is " The Old English Baron." 
Ann Radcliffe (b. 1764, d. 1823) has had great popularity 
as a novelist, especially by her " Mysteries of Udolpho." 



CHAPTER XVI. 

SECOND HALF OP THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : 
POETS AND DRAMATISTS. 

1. Mark Akenside. — 2. Thomas Gray. — 3. Oliver Goldsmith; Thomas Chatterton ; 
Charles Churchill. — 4. James Grainger; William Falconer; James Beattie; 
James iMacpherson ; Thomas Percy. — 5. Samuel Foote; David Garrick ; Rich- 
ard Cumberland ; John Home; Richard Brinsley Sheridan. — 0. William Cow- 
per. — 7. Robert Burns. — 8. Erasmus Darwin; Elizabeth Carter; John Wol- 
cot; Anna Lietitia Barbauld ; Henry James Pye; James Grahame. — 9. Eliza- 
beth Inchbald ; Hannah Cowley ; Charles and Thomas Dibdin. 

1. Mark Akenside (b. 1721, d. 1770) was son of a butcher at New- 
castle-on-Tyne. He was sent to the Edinburgh University, with aid of 
a fund for the purpose, to be educated as a Dissenting minister; but he 
made medicine his study, was proud of his oratory in the debates of the 
Medical Society, and aspired to a seat in Parliament. After three years 
at Edinburgh Akenside went to Leyden, where he staid another three 
years, took his degree as M.D., and found a friend in a student of law, 
Jeremiah Dyson, who came home with him. "The Pleasures of Imagina- 
tion," in its first form, appeared in 1744, when Akenside's age was twenty- 
three. Its subject was suggested by Addison's essays on Imagination, 
in the "Spectator." Akenside wrote odes also, and worked at the 
elaboration of his chief poem throughout his life, publishing the enlarge- 
ment of his First Book in 1757, and of the Second in 1765; the enlarge- 
ment of Book III., with an unfinished fragment of Book IV., appeared 
after his death. Akenside had less feeling for the sense of poetry than 
for its sound. His style was artificial. In life he affected a false dig- 
nity, and his pompous manner laid him open to Smollett's ridicule. He 
was ashamed of a lameness caused in childhood by the fall of a cleaver 
in his father's shop. He never married, and was greatly indebted to the 
liberality of Mr. Dyson for income while he was endeavoring to make a 
practice. 

2. Thomas Gray, born in 1716, was son of a money-scrive- 
ner on Cornhill, and the only one of his twelve children who 
survived their infancy. His father was morose and indolent, 
neglected business, and spent money in building a countiy 
house at Wanstead, without telling his wife what he was about. 
Mrs. Gra}-, on her part, had joined Miss Antrobus — one of 

603 



604 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

her sisters — in business, and made money by a kind of India 
warehouse, on Cornhill. Gray was sent to school at Eton, 
because his mother had a brother among the assistant masters 
there. At Eton he formed a friendship with Horace Walpole, 
youngest son of Sir Robert. His uncle at Eton being a fellow 
of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, Gray entered there as a pen- 
sioner, in 1734, but afterwards removed to Peterhouse. In 1738 
he left without a degree, and in the spring of 1739 set out for 
travel in France and Italy, as the companion of Horace Walpole. 
In Italy the friends disagreed. Gray left Walpole at Peggio, 
went on before him to Venice, and returned to England about 
two months before his father's death, in 1741. Gray and Wal- 
pole were not reconciled till 1744. Being urged by his friends 
to make law his profession, Gra} T went to reside at Cambridge 
again, and took the degree of B.C.L. At Stoke, in 1742, he 
wrote his ode " On the Spring " — much verse was written by 
Gray in the spring and summer of this year — and in the autumn 
his ode "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College," the first pub- 
lished verse of Gray's, although it did not appear until 1747. 
From 1742 until his death, in 1771, Gray lived chiefly at Cam- 
bridge, where, in 1768, he was made Professor of Modern His- 
tor}\ In 1750 he had completed his "Eleg}* Written in a 
Country Churchyard," suggested b} r the churchyard at Stoke 
Pogis. In February, 1751, Gray wrote to Horace Walpole that 
the proprietors of a magazine were about to publish his Eleg}-, 
and said : " I have but one bad way left to escape the honor 
they would inflict upon me ; and therefore am obliged to desire 
you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which may be 
done in less than a week's time) from your cop} r , but without 
my name, in what form is most convenient for him, but on 
his best paper and character. He must correct the press 
himself, and print it without an}* interval between the stanzas, 
because the sense is in some places continued beyond them ; 
and the title must be, ' Elegy Written in a Country Church- 
yard.' If he would add a line or two to say it came into his 
hands b} T accident, I should like it better." Walpole did as 
was wished, and wrote an advertisement to the effect that acci- 
dent alone brought the poem before the public, although an 



To A.D. 1800.] OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 605 

apology was unnecessary to any but the author. On which 
Gray wrote, " I thank you for your advertisement, which saves 
my honor." Gray's fame has its deepest foundations in the 
simplest of his poems — that on the site of his old Eton play- 
ground, and the Elegy, which in all revisions he sought to bring 
into simple harmony with its theme. He expunged classicism. 
In one familiar stanza he put Hampden in the place of Gracchus, 
or some other ancient worth}-. Milton and Cromwell, for Tully 
and Caesar, improved the lines — 

"Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest, 
Some Caesar guiltless of his country's blood." 

In March, 1753, Gray's mother died, as his father had died, 
of gout, from which he himself suffered severel}' ; and in the 
same }ear appeared " Six Poems," with designs by R. Bentle}*. 
In 1754 he wrote his odes on " The Progress of Poes}~," and 
on "The Bard," both published in 1757, at Strawberry Hill. 
The first collected edition of Gray's " Poenls " was not pub- 
lished till 17G8, three years before his death. 

3. Oliver Goldsmith (b. 1728, d. 1774) was one of seven 
children of a poor Irish clergyman ; was educated at the village 
school of Lissoy ; entered, with aid from an uncle, Mr. Con- 
tarine, in 1745, as a sizar at TrinhVv College, Dublin, and there 
graduated as B.A. in 1749. From 1752 to 1754 he was study- 
ing medicine at Edinburgh, and continued like studies in 1755 
at Lcyden. He then travelled on foot about the Continent. 
In 1756 he was in London, and tried many wa} T s of earning 
bread. He had no skill in managing outward affairs of life, 
but had within him a pure breath of genius. He wrote criti- 
cisms for " The Monthly Review," and then for " The Critical 
Review;" published, in 1759, "An Enquiry into the Present 
State of Polite Learning in Europe ; ' ' produced eight numbers 
of a paper called "The Bee;" and contributed in 1760, to 
Newber}''s new daily paper, " The Public Ledger," two articles 
a week for a guinea apiece. These essays, collected in 1762, 
as " The Citizen of the World," are full of the kindliest humor, 
and in prose written with the unaffected grace of a true poet. 
In 1763 Johnson, who felt the worth of Goldsmith, and was his 
firm friend, sold the manuscript of the " Vicar of Wakefield '* 



606 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

for sixt} T pounds, to relieve Goldsmith from immediate distress 
and debt. In December, 1764, bis poem of the "Traveller ; or, 
a Prospect of Society," appeared, and Goldsmith rose in fame. 
Its success caused the purchaser of the " Vicar of Wakefield " 
to publish it, at last, in Februaiy, 1766; and it went through 
three editions before the end of August. Goethe tells us that 
when, aged twent3~-five (and in the year of Goldsmith's death), 
he was a law-student at Strasburg, Herder read to him a trans- 
lation of the " Vicar of Wakefield." More than half a century 
after Goldsmith's death, when the German poet was by many 
regarded as the patriarch of contemporary European literature, 
he ascribed, in a letter to his friend Zelter, the best influence 
over his mind to the spirit of that wise and wholesome story 
as it was made known to him ' - just at the critical moment of 
mental development." In 1768 Goldsmith's first corned}*, the 
"Good-natured Man," was produced; in 1770 appeared his 
other poem of great mark, " The Deserted Village ; " in 1773, 
his other comed} T , -' She Stoops to Conquer," was acted; and 
Goldsmith died on the 4th of April, 1774. He did much other 
work of the pen, wrote histories of Greece, Rome, England, 
and of Animated Nature. His " Vicar of Wakefield " brought 
idyllic grace into the novel of real life, and his "Traveller" 
and ' - Deserted Village ' ' calmly reflect some shadows of the 
life and thought of Europe in his day. 

Thomas Chatterton was born in 1752, and was taught at 
a charit} r school in his native town of Bristol, and articled to 
an attorn e} T . The boy, with a poet's genius, and a turn for 
antiquities, pla} T ed upon the reviving taste for our old national 
literature among men who had still but a faint critical sense of 
its form of thought or language, by inventing a series of mock 
antique poems, which he ascribed to an imaginary priest of 
Bristol, named Thomas Rowley. Rowley lived, he said, three 
centuries before the poems were discovered by his father in an 
old chest in the church of St. Maiy Redcliffe, where he and 
his forefathers had been sextons for many generations. Chat- 
terton came to London in 1770, with the confidence of genius, 
warmed by young hope and ambition ; found himself starving 
in the midst of plenty, with a defiant sense of power. He was 



ToA.D. 1800.] THOMAS PERCY. 607 

but a bo} r ; his was not yet a sustaining power ; and he poi- 
soned himself in the agony of his despair. 

Charles Churchill (b. 1731, d. 1764) had been ordained 
without a degree ; had a wife and two sons, and lived by a poor 
school when he succeeded his father as curate and lecturer of 
St. John's, Westminster, and added to his little income by 
teaching English to young ladies at a boarding-school. He 
delighted in the theatre, and in 1761 published at his own cost, 
as a shilling pamphlet, the " Rosciad," a critical satire on the 
stage, in thought bold, in verse masterly. Other keen satires 
in verse followed. Churchill turned to the larger stage, sup- 
ported AVilkes, wrote, in 1762, " The' Ghost ; " in 1763, " The 
Prophecy of Famine," a satire on Scotland and the Scotch; 
lived a wild life, wrote other satires, and died after four 3-ears of 
a brilliant intellectual career that caused Garrick to say of him 
after his death, "Such talents, with prudence, had commanded 
the nation." 

4. James Grainger (b. 1723, d. 1767), was a Scotch physician, who 
left practice in London, and, finding a wife on his way out, settled in the 
Island of St. Christopher, where he wrote his poem of the "Sugar- 
Cane," published in 1764. Another Scot, "William Falconer, born 
about 1735, published in London, in 1702, a touching poem, called " The 
Shipwreck," and himself died by shipwreck in 1769. James Beattie 
(h. 1735, d. 1803) was the son of a village shopkeeper at Lawrencekirk. 
He became an usher in the Aberdeen Grammar School, then professor 
in Marischal College. He published " Original Poems and Translations " 
in 1761; in 1770 an angry "Essay on Truth" against Hume; and in 
1771 the first book of "The Minstrel." That won him strong friends 
in London, and a pension of two hundred pounds from the king. 
Another Scotsman, James Macpherson (b. 1738, d. 1796), published, 
in 1762, poems attributed to Ossian, founded in part on Gaelic traditional 
poetry, but so modern in form, and so expressive of the sentimental gloom 
then fashionable, that they owed their great success to the reproduction 
in new form of living tendencies of thought. The controversy as to 
their genuineness was, like that over the Rowley poems, sign of a 
sympathy with the past, that was not yet informed by any critical 
understanding. Thomas Percy (b. 1729, d. 1811), son of a grocer at 
Bridgenorth, was sent from his town grammar-school with an exhibition 
to Oxford, and was from 1753 to 1778 Vicar of Easton Maudit, in North- 
amptonshire. He had a turn for literature, and amused himself as a 
collector of old ballads, having for the basis of his collection a folio 
manuscript collection in a handwriting of about the time of Charles I. 



G08 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1750 

The result was liis " Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," published in 
1765, in which he meddled with the old ballads to bring them into some 
accord with the conventional taste of his age, and still was condemned 
by many as an antiquary. But his book struck a true note, and was 
food for young minds in the coming time. Walter Scott remembered 
the spot where he read Percy's "Beliques" for the first time, and 
believed that he read no book " half so frequently, or with half the 
enthusiasm." Percy became chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, 
with whose house his name of Percy inspired him to claim kindred: he 
was blessed also with a wife whose pride it was to have once mi: 
prince ; he became Dean of Carlisle in 1778, and, in 1782. Bishop of Dro- 
more, in Ireland. 

5. In 1770 Samuel Foote (b. about 1720, d. 1777) was satirizing men 
of his time in the series of comedies begun in 1752. Garrick also was 
among the dramatists; and George Colman (b. about 1733, d. 179-4 and 
Richard Cumberland (b. 1732, d. 1811), who began their dramatic 
careers in 1760. John Home (b. 1724, d. 1808), ordained, in 1750, min- 
ister of Athelstaneford, in East Lothian, produced in 1756, at Edin- 
burgh, his tragedy of "Douglas," whereby he so much offended the 
Presbytery, that, to avoid church censure, he resigned his living, and be- 
came a layman. He then wrote several other plays. Richard Brinsley 
Sheridan, whose wit revived English comedy towards the close of the 
eighteenth century, was born in Dublin in 1751, son of an actor who 
taught elocution. After education at Harrow, he eloped from Bath with 
Miss Linley, a famous singer, then eighteen years old, and daughter of a 
composer; fought two duels; and then, having to live by his wits, pro- 
duced his comedy of "The Rivals," in January, 1775. when he was 
twenty-four years old. "The Duenna" followed at the close of the 
same year; in February, 1777, "The Trip to Scarborough," an alteration 
of Yanbrugh's "Relapse;" and in May, 1777, "The School for Scan- 
dal." Sheridan's last piece was "The Critic," in 1779. He died in 
July, 1816. 

6. William. Cowper, though he lived longer and wrote 
later in life, was of the same age as Charles Churchill, and 
about three years younger than Goldsmith. He was born in 
November, 1731, son of the Rev. John Cowper, rector of Great 
Berkhamstead, and chaplain to George II. His mother died 
when he was six 3*ears old. After earl}* experience of a rough 
school and two 3'ears ' suffering from inflammation of the 
Cowper was sent, aged ten, to Westminster School, where he 
had Charles Churchill and Warren Hastings among his school- 
fellows. The kindness of school-fellowship made Cowper after- 
wards recognize in his verse the good of Churchill when the 



To A.D. iSoo.j WILLIAM COWPER. 609 

world only condemned him for his faults. In 1749 Cowper left 
Westminster, was entered of the Middle Temple, and articled 
for three years to a solicitor, who had two daughters. One of 
them, Theodora, touched his } r oung fane}- ; the other, Harriet, 
was his friend afterwards as Lady Hesketh. A nervous melan- 
choly, shadow of evil to come, had weighed on Cowper. When 
he was called to the bar in 1754, Theodora's father refused 
sanction to his daughter's engagement with Cowper, and he saw 
her no more. Two 3-ears later, his father died. Cowper's 
means diminished. He was made a Commissioner of Bank- 
rupts, which brought him sixty pounds a year. In 1763, an 
uncle, Major Cowper, offered him the choice of two out of the 
three offices of Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords, 
Reading Clerk, and Clerk of Committees, to which he had a 
right of presentation. He flinched from taking more than one ; 
and when the Major's right of nomination to that was ques- 
tioned, and the fitness of the nominee was to be tested, Cow- 
per's nervous excitement passed into lunac}*, and he was placed, 
in December, 1763, in an asylum at St. Albans. When he re- 
covered, Cowper gave up his small office of Commissioner of 
Bankrupts, and was chiefly dependent on his friends. In June, 
1765, he went into retired lodgings at Huntingdon, where he be- 
came acquainted with the Rev. William Unwin and his wife, and 
their son, a }'Oung clerg}*man. He went to live with them as 
friend and lodger. Mrs. Unwin became a widow in June, 1767, 
and presently removed, Cowper with her, to Olne}', Bucking- 
hamshire, where the Rev. John Newton, once master of a slave- 
vessel, was curate. The influence of Mr. Newton, and the death 
of his own brother, in 1770, increased Cowper's melancholy. 
In 1771 Cowper joined Newton in the composition of a hymn- 
book, for which Cowper wrote those signed "C." in the 
volume published in 1779, as " Olney Hymns." In 1773 
Cowper had another attack of insanity, in which he attempted 
suicide. In 1780 Mr. Newton left Olney. Mrs. Unwin then 
suggested to Cowper that he should write some sustained work 
in verse, believing that this occupation would preserve health 
for his mind. He wrote "The Progress of Error" — found 
health in the occupation — and wrote " Truth," " Table-Talk," 



610 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |A.D. 1750 

•'Expostulation," these pieces being all written between De- 
cember, 1780, and the following March. They were sent to a 
publisher who asked for more. Then " Hope " and " Charity ' ' 
were added ; ' • Conversation ' ' and k ' Retirement ' ' while the 
book was being printed ; and in March, 1782, William Cowper, 
aged fifty, first joined the company of English poets. Lady 
Austen, a baronet's widow, sister-in-law of a clergyman near 
Olney, had then become Cowper' s friend. Her liveliness cured 
his low spirits ; she set him laughing with the story of John 
Gilpin. When he went to bed, it amused him half through the 
night, and next morning it was turned into the best of playful 
ballads. Lady Austen advised him to give up the couplet, and 
write something in blank- verse. tk Set me a subject, then." 
said he. "Oh, you can write on any thing; write upon this 
sofa." So Cowper began the best of his poems, and called it 
" The Task," begun in the summer of 1783, finished in 1784, 
and published in 1785. In 1784 he began his translation of 
Homer. Work at Homer was his chief security for health. 
The Homer, in blank-verse, was published in 1791. and a 
thousand pounds paid for it. Then Mrs. Unwin was seized 
with palsy. Gowper's mind suffered again. He battled with 
insanity ; rjlanned work upon Milton ; but sank again into 
painful sickness of mind, from which, after Mrs. Unwin' s 
death, in 1796, only revision of his Homer gave relief. " I 
may as well do this," he said, " for I can do nothing else ; " 
and worked on sadly till his death in 1800. The rising ; 
of the time speaks even from the pure strain of Cowper Id 
his solitude. He denounced the Bastile. •• My ear is pained."' 
he said, 

•' My soul is sick with every day's report 
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled." 

7. Robert Burns was born January 25. 1 759, two miles south 
of the town of Ayr. In 1766, his father, with a hundred pounds, 
borrowed monej*, took the farm of Mount Oliphant. in the parish 
of Ayr. He was unsuccessful, and fell into the hands of a 
harsh factor. Robert Burns was sent, at six years old, with 
his next brother, Gilbert, to a school ax Alloway Mill for a few 






ToA.D. 1800.] ROBERT BURNS. 611 

months ; then taught with children of neighbors b}~ a Mr. Mur- 
doch ; then Iry their father, a devout, hard-headed Scot, with a 
touch of obstinacy in him. Then they were sent to school on 
alternate weeks for a quarter, at Dahwmple, two or three miles 
off, for writing-lessons. About 1777 the lease of Mount Oli- 
phant was broken, and William Burness went to Lochlea, in the 
parish of Tarbolton. Robert was sent to Kirkoswald parish 
school to learn mensuration, and passed his nineteenth summer 
on a smuggling coast. At home he and his brother worked on 
the farm, and had seven pounds a year each as wages from their 
father, with which to clothe themselves and meet other expenses. 
In 1781 Robert went for six months to Irvine to learn flax- 
dressing. In 1783, at the end of the year, three months before 
their father's death, he and his brother Gilbert had taken the 
farm of Mossgiel, of a hundred and nineteen acres, at ninety 
pounds' rent, in the neighboring parish of Mauchline. Robert 
was there four years, during which the farm did not prosper, 
but the poet's genius developed fast. He found a friend in 
Gavin Hamilton, of Mauchline, from whom the farm was sub- 
leased, and joined in a feud of his with Mr. Auld, the minister 
of Mauchline, who was fierce against all heterodox opinions. 
Thus Burns came to write "The Holy Fair," "The Twa 
Herds," and tk Holy Willie's Prayer," a scathing satire against 
self-righteous intolerance. To the same period belong " Hal- 
loween " and the " Cotter's Saturday Night," in which his 
father was the pious cotter. Burns drew his notion from " The 
Farmer's Ingle" of Robert Ferguson, a Scottish poet, nine 
years older than himself, son of a draper's clerk at Edinburgh, 
who had poured out his native strain of verse between 1771 and 
the date of his death in a lunatic-asylum, in 1774, when he was 
only twent}*-four 3-ears old. Burns sang to himself also in the 
days at Mossgiel as he drove the plough (completing the verses 
in his head, and writing them down when he went home in the 
evening) his touching poems "To a Mountain Dais}'," that 
lay in the path of his plough, and "Toa Mouse," whose home 
the ploughshare laid in ruins. On the unprosperous farm Burns 
was thinking of emigration from his native land when he 
wrote : 



612 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITER ATI! UK. [A. D. 1750 

" But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 
In proving foresight may be vain; 
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

GTang aft agley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain 
For promised joy. 

" Still thou art blest, compared wi' me ! 
The present only toucheth thee ; 
But, och ! I backward cast my e'e 

On prospects drear, 
An' forward, tho' I canna see, 

I guess an' fear!" 

Hopeless of Mossgiel, Robert Burns thought of trjing his 
fortune as manager of a plantation in the West Indies, if he 
could raise money to pa}- for his passage. Then it occurred 
to him that the money might be raised by printing the poems 
he had written. He added a new piece or two, including 
''The Twa Dogs," and the "Poems" of Robert Burns first 
appeared, printed at Kilmarnock, in the autumn of 1786. At 
the last moment, when Burns was about to leave Scotland, 
a generous letter from Dr. Thomas Blacklock changed his 
destiny. Blacklock was the son of a Scotch brick^er ; had 
been blinded b} T small-pox in his infancj", and had developed 
unusual powers through being much read to hy his friends. He 
became a scholar and a poet, was a man of the finest tone of 
mind, and having been made easy by a post in the University, 
he took orders, and became D.D. The gentle Blacklock, who 
had also published verse, brought Burns to Edinburgh, and 
found him friends in the University. In April, 1787, a second 
edition of his poems was published at Edinburgh, by subscrip- 
tion. Burns was supplied with rnone}' ; but although then and 
always he yielded too readily to temptation, he held to his 
vocation as a farmer, sent one hundred and eighty pounds to his 
brother to help him at Mossgiel, and after a little tour agreed for 
a farm at Ellisland, in March, 1788. Johnson's " Museum of 
Scottish Song" was started in 1787, and to this Burns, whom 
nature had made greatest among lyric poets, sent lyric after 
lyric in pure love of song, taking no payment, and disdaining 
the thought of being paid for singing. In April, 1788, he mar- 



ToA.D. iSoo.l KKAHMUS VARW1X. 613 

ried Jean Armour, who had been refused him bj r her father 
when he was poor and there was scandal in their love ; and then 
he sang to her : 

" She is a winsome wee thing, 
She is a handsome wee thing, 
She is a lo'esome wee thing, 

This dear wee wife o' mine. 



" The warld's wrack we share o't, 
The warstle and the care o't; 
Wi' her I'll blythely bear it, 

And think my lot divine." 



The wild, wilful, defiant verse, the wanton lines cast in the 
teeth of censure, belonged parti}' to Burns's own nature, partly 
to the tumult of his time ; but out of the depths of his soul came 
many a strain of thought and feeling that had taken root there 
in the poor farm at Mount Oliphant, when, " The cheerfu' sup- 
per done," " The saint, the father, and the husband " prayed. 
In 1787 Burns had asked for and got a place in the Excise, but 
it. now took him awa}* from his farm-work. Captain Grose, the 
antiquary, came to his farm when gathering materials for his 
" Antiquities of Scotland," published in 1789-91. Burns told 
him a Galloway legend, and gave it him in verse for his book as 
" Tam o' Shanter." In the winter of 1791 Burns was promoted 
to the Dumfries division of the Excise, with sevent}* pounds a 
year, and went with his family to Dumfries. Parted from the 
nature of which he was poet, exposed to the temptations that he 
was weak to resist, Burns failed in health and spirits. War 
with France was impending. Burns felt all the revolutionary 
fervor and the hope that sprang out of the ruins of the Bastile. 
He had gallantly seized an armed smuggling craft, and when 
her effects were sold he bought four small carronades, and sent 
them as a gift from Robert Burns to the French Convention. 
They were stopped at Dover, and the too zealous exciseman 
was admonished. The rest is a sad tale of poverty and failing 
health, until the poet's death on the 21st of July, 1796. 

8. There were several poets in this period who once had con- 
siderable reputation. Erasmus Darwin (b. 1731, d. 1802) 
published, in 1781, "The Botanical Garden," in exposition of 



614 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1750. 

the loves of plants. Elizabeth Carter (b. 1717, d. 1806) 
was noted as a letter-writer, poet, and linguist. John Wol- 
COt (b. 1738, d. 1819) published, under the name of Peter 
Pindar, many witty but coarse satires; particularly, "A Poet- 
ical Epistle to the Reviewers;" " Iyyric Odes to the Royal 
Academicians ; " " The Lousiad ; " and " The Apple Dumplings 
and a King." Anna Laetitia Barbauld (b. 1743, d. 1825) 
was an industrious writer of many sorts of books, particularly 
of poems, of which the last is " Eighteen Hundred and Eleven." 
Henry James Pye (b. 1745, d. 1813) was made poet-laure- 
ate in 1790. Among his poems are kw Farringdon-Hill ; " "The 
Progress of Refinement ; " and "Alfred," an epic. James 
Grahame (b. 1765, d. 1811) is remembered chiefly for his 
poem, "The Sabbath." 

9. Elizabeth Inchbald (b. 1753, d. 1821) was first an 
actress ; then won success as a writer of plays, including " Such 
Things Are," " Lovers' Vows," and " To Marry, or not to 
Marry." She also wrote novels. Hannah Cowley (b. 1743, 
d. 1809) wrote several successful poems, — "The Maid of 
Arragon," "The Siege of Acre," etc.; besides many come- 
dies, such as *? The Runaway," and " The Belle's Strata- 
gem." Charles Dibdin (b. 1748, d. 1814), and his son, 
Thomas Dibdin (b. 1771, d. 1840), wrote operas, comedies, 
farces, popular songs, etc. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



William Wordsworth. 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
Robert Southey. 
Sir Walter Scott. 
George Crabbe. 
Samuel Rogers. 
Thomas Campbell. 
Walter Savage Landor. 
Thomas Moore. 

William Godwin. 

Maria Edgeworth. 

Matthew Gregory Lewis. 

Amelia Opie. 

Jane Austen. 

Jane Porter. 

Anna Maria Porter. 

Barbara Hofland. 

Mary Brunton. 

Sir Walter Scott. 



Joanna Baillie. 

William Gifford. 
William Cobbett. 
Leigh Hunt. 
Charles Lamb. 
William Hazlitt. 
Sydney Smith. 



POETS. 
Lord Byron. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
John Keats. 
Robert Bloomfield. 
William Lisle Bowles. 
Mary Tighe. 
James Montgomery. 
Robert Montgomery. 
Henry Kirke White. 

NOVELISTS. 

Mrs. Shelley. 
James Morier. 
Thomas Hope. 
Robert P. Ward. 
Theodore Hook. 
Thomas H. Lister. 
Lady Blessington. 
Mrs. Trollope. 
Mary Russell Mitford. 
G. P. R. James. I 

DRAMATISTS. 

I Sir Thomas N. Talfourd. I James Sheridan Knowles. 



Reginald Heber. 
Felicia Hemans. 
James Hogg. 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes. 
John Keble. 
Ebenezer Elliott. 
Hartley Coleridge. 
Arthur Henry Hallam. 
Letitia Elizabeth Landon. 



John Gait. 

William H. Ainsworth. 
Captain Marryat. 
Lord Lytton. 
Lord Beaconsfield. 
Charlotte Bronte. 
Charles Dickens. 
William M. Thackeray. 



ESSAYISTS AND SATIRISTS. 



John Wilson. 
Walter Savage Landor. 
Thomas DeQuincey. 
James Smith. 
Horace Smith. 
Lord Jeffrey. 



j Lord Brougham. 
I Lord Macaulay. 

John Foster. 

Thomas Hood. 

Douglas Jerrold. 

Thomas Carlyle. 



HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS. 



Henry Hart Milman. 
James Mill. 
William Mitford. 
Connop Thirlwall. 
John Lingard. 
Patrick Fraser Tytler. 

Richard Porson. 
Isaac Disraeli. 



Dugald Stewart. 
Thomas Brown. 



Robert Hall. 
Thomas Chalmers. 
Augustus William Hare. 
Julius Charles Hare. 

MEN 
Jeremy Bentham. 
Thomas Robert Malthus. 

MEN 
Sir William Herschel. 
Sir Humphry Davy. 



Henry Hallam. 
George Grote. 
Thomas Arnold. 
Earl Stanhope. 
Sir William Napier. 
Sharon Turner. 

SCHOLARS. 
I Thomas F. Dibdin. 
I George L. Craik. 

PHILOSOPHERS. 

I Sir James Mackintosh. 
I Sir William Hamilton. 

THEOLOGIANS. 
Edward Bouverie Pusey. 
John Keble. 
John Henry Newman. 
Thomas Arnold. 



| Lord Macaulay. 
| Thomas Carlyle. 
; John Gibson Lockhart. 
j William Roscoe. 
Nathan Drake. 



John Payne Collier. 



Richard Whately. 



Frederick Denison 

Maurice. 
Frederick William 

Robertson. 



OF POLITICAL 

I David Ricardo. 

OF PHYSICAL 

I Michael Faraday. 
I Mary Someiville. 



SCIENCE. 

i Nassau William Senior. 

SCIENCE. 

| Sir Charles Lyell. 
i Hugh Miller. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 

POETS. 

1. William Wordsworth. — 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. — 3. Robert Southey. — 4. 
Sir Walter Scott. — 5. George Crabbe. — 6. Sanuel Rogers. — 7. Thomas Camp- 
bell.— 8. Walter Savage Landor. — 9. Thomas Moore. — 10. Lord Byron. — 11. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley. — 12. John Keats. — 13. Robert Bloomfield ; William L. 
Bowles; MaryTighe; James Montgomery ; Robert Montgomery ; Henry Kirke 
White; Reginald Heber; Felicia Hemans ; James Hogg; T. L. Beddoes; John 
Keble; Ebenezer Elliott; Hartley Coleridge; Arthur Henry Hallam ; Let ilia 
Elizabeth Landon. 

1. William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, on 
the 7th of April, 1770, second son of John Wordsworth, attor- 
ney and law-agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of 
Lonsdale. From 1770 to 1778, when his mother died of con- 
sumption, Wordsworth spent his infancy and early boyhood at 
Cockermouth, and sometimes with his mother's parents at Pen- 
rith. He was the only one of her five children about whom she 
was anxious ; for he was, he says, of a stiff, moody, violent 
temper. He was bold in outdoor sports ; and, free to read 
what he pleased, read Fielding through in his boyhood, " Don 
Quixote," " Gil Bias," " Gulliver's Travels," and the " Tale 
of a Tub." After home teaching at a dame school, and by a 
Rev. Mr. Gilbanks, Wordsworth was sent, in 1778, to Hawks- 
head School, in the Vale of Esthwaite, in Lancashire. His 
father died in 1783, and bequeathed only a considerable debt 
from his emplo3 r er, paid to his children long afterwards, when 
Lord Lonsdale died. In October, 1787, Wordsworth's uncles 
sent him to Cambridge, where the university life of that time 
fell below his 3"oung ideal. He spent his first summer vacation, 
1788, in the old cottage at Esthwaite with Dame Tyson; his 
second vacation he spent with his uncles at Penrith, who were 
educating him, and who designed him for the church. But that 

617 



G18 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

was the year when the Fall of the Bastile resounded through 
Europe, and young hearts leaped with enthusiastic hope. It 
was with young Wordsworth as with his Solitary in " The Ex- 
cursion." Men had been questioning the outer and the inner 
life: 

" The intellectual power, through words and things, 
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way," 

and men were roused from that abstraction : 

" For lo! the dread Bastile, 
With all the chambers in its horrid towers, 
Fell to the ground ; by violence overthrown 
Of indignation, and with shouts that drowned 
The crash it made in falling! From the wreck 
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise, 
The appointed seat of equitable law 
And mild paternal sway. The potent shock 
I felt: the transformation I perceived, 
As marvellously seized as in that moment 
When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld 
Glory, beyond all glory ever seen, 
Confusion infinite of heaven and earth, 
Dazzling the soul. Meanwhile, prophetic harps 
In every grove were ringing ' War shall cease ; 
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured ? 
Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck 
The tree of Liberty.' My heart rebounded; 
My melancholy voice the chorus joined — 
' Be joyful all ye nations; in all lands, 
Ye that are capable of joy be glad ! 
Henceforth, whate'er is wanting to yourselves 
In others ye shall promptly find; and all, 
Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth, 
Shall with one heart honor their common kind.' " 

His next holiday Wordsworth took in France, with his friend 
Robert Jones, each canying a stick, his luggage in a handker- 
chief, and twenty pounds in his pocket. They landed at Calais 
on the eve of the fete of the Federation, July 14, anniversary 
of the capture of the Bastile, when the king was to swear 
fidelity to the Constitution. All that he saw raised Words- 
worth's enthusiasm as they travelled through France to the 
Alps : 



To A.D. 1850.] WILLIAM WORDSWOliTII. 619 

" a glorious time, 
A happy time, that was ; triumphant looks 
Were then the common language of all eyes ; 
As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed 
Their great expectancy." 

Wordsworth came home ; graduated as B.A. in 1791 ; visited 
his friend Jones in the Vale of Clwydd, and made an excursion 
in North Wales. In the autumn he was in Paris again ; went 
thence to Orleans, to learn French where there were fewer 
English. At Orleans, where he formed intimate friendship with 
the Republican general Beaupuis, at Blois, and at Paris, where 
he arrived a month after the September massacres, he spent 
thirteen months. In events terrible to him he saw the excesses 
of re-action, but he sj'mpathized so strongty with the Brissotins 
that he would have made common cause with them, and perhaps 
have perished, if he had not been compelled to return to London 
before the execution of the king, January 21, 1793. Like other 
young men of the day, he was bitterly indignant at the alliance 
of his country with despotic powers to put down the Revolu- 
tion. That war of the Revolution, which began in 1793, and 
ended at the Peace of Amiens in 1802, was in his e} T es an unholy 
war, and laid the foundations of the patriotic war against Napo- 
leon which followed, from 1803, to the battle of Waterloo, on the 
18th of June, 1815. In 1793, after his return from France, 
Wordsworth published "Descriptive Sketches during a Pedes- 
trian Tour on the Italian, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps; " also, 
"An Evening Walk, an Epistle in Verse." In May, 1794, 
lie was planning a literary and political miscellany, called " The 
Philanthropist," which was to be Republican, not Revolutionar}'. 
In November, he was looking for employment on an Opposition 
newspaper, that he might pour out his heart against the war. But 
presently he heard of the sickness of a young friend at Penrith, 
Raisley Calvert, like himself the son of a law-agent. Words- 
worth went to Penrith and nursed him. Calvert was d}ing, and 
had nine hundred pounds to leave, a sum that would make 
Wordsworth master of his fortunes. He died in January, 1795, 
and left Wordsworth his mone} r . Then Wordsworth resolved, 
by frugal living, to secure full independence, and to be a poet. 



620 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

111 the autumn he and his sister Dorothy settled at Racedown, 
near Crewkerne, a retired place with a post once a week. And 
thus Wordsworth began his career at the time when that of 
Burns was ending. He was newly settled with his sister at 
Racedown when he heard of the death of Burns. He was at 
work on his tragedy of "The Borderers" (first published in 
1842). At Racedown, in June, 1797, Coleridge, who had read 
the ' k Descriptive Sketches," looked in upon Wordsworth and 
his sister. Each youag poet felt the genius of the other, and 
there was soon a warm friendship between them. Soon the 
Words worths removed to Alfoxden in order to be near Cole- 
ridge, who then lived at Nether Stowey. The two poets then 
began to plan the volume of " Lyrical Ballads," first published 
in September, 1798. It included the " Ancient Mariner," with 
Wordsworth's " We are Seven," the " Idiot Boy," etc., written 
with distinct sense of a principle that deliberately condemned 
and set aside the poetic " diction " of the eighteenth century. 
As much pains was taken by Wordsworth to avoid the diction 
as other men take to produce it. The poet, he argued, thinks 
and feels in the spirit of human passions, and differs from 
others in a gre'ater promptness to think and feel without imme- 
diate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing 
such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that man- 
ner. His painting of men and nature must show his percep- 
tion of deep truths ; but to do that fitly, it must be true itself to 
the life of his fellow-men in every imagined incident, and speak 
the common language. A selection, he said, of the language 
really spoken by man, wherever it is made with taste and feel- 
ing, will itself form a distinction far greater than would at first 
be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the 
vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life. For if the poet's sub- 
ject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occa- 
sion, lead him to passions, the language of which, if selected 
truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and varie- 
gated, and alive with metaphors and figures. In their common 
work, Coleridge was to give the sense of realhy to visions of 
the fancy, Wordsworth to make the soul speak from the common 
things of life. The first edition of the " Lyrical Ballads " was 



To A.D. 1850.] WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 621 

published by Southey's friend, Cottle, at Bristol. The second 
edition, containing onty Wordsworth's work, was published in 
London, in 1800, as " Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems." 
After the founding of " The Edinburgh Review " in 1802, 
Wordsworth had to fight for his doctrine, and stormed all the 
positions of the hostile critics. 

For the first edition of the " Lyrical Ballads," in September, 
1798, there was some mone} T paid. Wordsworth had thirty 
guineas for his part, and a holiday abroad was resolved on. 
Wordsworth and his sister, with Coleridge and a friend of his, 
crossed, in the autumn of 1798, from Yarmouth to Hamburg, 
where they staid a few days, and met Klopstock several times. 
Coleridge went north, to Ratzburg ; Wordsworth and his sister 
went south, and wintered, for cheapness, at Goslar, near the 
Hartz mountains. There, in the spring, Wordsworth wrote the 
opening lines of that autobiographical poem which was pub- 
lished after his death, in 1850, as " The Prelude ; or, Growth of 
a Poet's Mind." His purpose was to review thoughtfully the 
course of his own mind through surrounding influences, and 
now that he had, with the "L3Tical Ballads," fairly begun 
work as a poet, to determine what his aim should be, what was 
the highest duty he could hope to do in his own calling. This 
work of retrospect and self-examination was not complete until 
the summer of 1805. Meanwhile he married. After his re- 
turn from Goslar, in the spring of 1799, his first visit was to 
the. family of Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, his old playmate 
and companion at dame school, and his future wife. He then 
settled with Dorotlry in a small cottage at Grasmere, to which, 
in 1802, he brought his wife. It was there that he finished 
" The Prelude," and, after tracing his life from childhood to the 
days of his enthusiastic s3 T mpath}* with the French Revolution, 
showed how, after his return, the influence of his sister Doro- 
th3 T , and communion with nature, brought him calmer sense of 
the great harmony of creation and of the place of man in the 
great whole. His interest in man grew deeper, as he cared less 
for the abstract questions about life, and more for the real man ; 

" Studious more to see 
Great truths, than touch and handle little ones." 



G'2'2 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

We have fought our battle, and won freedom enough to work 
on and show the use of freedom — to what end the powers of 
civil polity were given. All we have now to do is to remove 
hindrances and furnish aids to the development of each indi- 
vidual Englishman and Englishwoman. Let each unit become 
better and wiser, and the whole nation will grow in strength 
and wisdom by the growth of its constituent atoms. There are 
millions helpless or mischievous because Dot boru to conditions 
which have made the lives of others happy. We are not idly to 
lament "what man has made of man." but actively to meud 
the mischief. Whoever makes his own life and its influence 
wholesome, or in any wa}* helps to make lives about him whole- 
some, adds thereby to the strength of England, and is doing 
the true work of the nineteenth century. Having gained, said 
Wordsworth, 

" A more judicious knowledge of the worth 
And dignity of individual man ; 
No composition of the brain, but man — 
Of whom we read, the man whom we behold 
With our own eyes — I could not but inquire, 
Not with less interest than heretofore, 
But greater, though in spirit more subdued, 
Why is this glorious creature to be found 
One only in ten thousand ? What one is 
Why may not millions be ? " 

Upon this thought Wordsworth rested, but this thought is the 
key-note of the days in which we live. Wordsworth made it 
the one work of his life as a poet to uphold the ' ' dignity of in- 
dividual man," strengthen the sense of all the harmonies of 
nature, and show how, among them all, when taking its true 

place, 

" the mind of man becomes 
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
On which he dwells, above this frame of things 
(Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes 
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) 
In beauty exalted, as it is itself 
Of quality and fabric more divine." 

In 1807, he published two volumes of poems ; in 1814. k - The 
Excursion ; " in 1822, " Ecclesiastical Sketches in Verse ; " in 



ToA.D. 1850.] SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 623 

1835, "Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems." In 1842, he 
received a pension of three hundred pounds a year; in 1843, 
he was made poet-laureate ; and he died at his home, Rydal 
Mount, in 1850. 

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two years and a half younger 
than Wordsworth, was born October 21, 1772, the son of the 
vicar and schoolmaster at Ottery St. Mary. His father died when 
he was nine years old. In the following 3-ear he had a presenta- 
tion to Christ's Hospital from an old pupil of his father's, and 
was educated there till 1791. Then he was sent to Jesus Col- 
lege, Cambridge, and obtained, in the summer, Sir W. Brown's 
gold medal for a Greek ode on the Slave Trade. In 1793 he 
passed the summer at Ottery, wrote tk Songs of the Pixies; " 
and returned, in October, to Cambridge. In November, being 
in despair over his poverty and a hundred pounds of college debt, 
he left Cambridge, and soon afterwards enlisted as Private Silas 
Titus Comberbach, in the loth Light Dragoons. He was found 
at last, his discharge was obtained in April, 1794, and he went 
back to Cambridge, gave up hope of a fellowship, but could not 
take orders because he had become a Unitarian. He resolved 
to join Citizen Southey, and turn author. After a ramble in 
Wales he went to see Southe}- at Bristol, where he spent some 
time in wild political and literaiy schemes. Then Coleridge 
wrote political articles, preached in Unitarian pulpits, and 
travelled to obtain subscribers for a periodical outpouring of 
thought, to be called "The Watchman," which appeared from 
the 1st of March to the 13th of Ma}', 179G, in which }*ear also 
there were Poems of his published. He earned rnone}' by writ- 
ing verse in a newspaper. 'Coleridge had rare powers as poet 
and thinker, and a gift of speech that made them felt in daily 
intercourse by those about him. To be near a substantial 
helper, Mr. Thomas Poole, he went to live in a cottage at Nether 
Stowe}*, on the Bristol Channel. There was his home when he 
called on Wordsworth and his sister, and so strong a friendship 
was established that the house at Racedown was given up, and 
William and Dorothy Wordsworth went to live at Alfoxden, to 
be near Coleridge. In the autumn of 1797, Coleridge, with 
Wordsworth and his sister, started from Alfoxden for Linton, 



624 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

and rYi the course of the walk ''The Ancient Mariner" was 
planned as a poem to be sent to " The London Magazine," and 
bring five pounds towards expenses of the little holiday. Cole- 
ridge made the story out of a dream of his friend, Mr. Cruik- 
shank. Wordsworth suggested introducing into it the crime of 
shooting the albatross, because he had been reading about alba- 
trosses in Shelvocke's " Voyage round the World." Words- 
worth also suggested the navigation of the ship by dead men, 
and furnished here and there a line. The poem grew till it 
was too important to be given to a magazine. It was at this 
time, also, that he wrote " Christabel," "An Ode to the De- 
parting Year," and his tragedy, "Remorse." In 1798, through 
the generosity of a wealtlry friend, Josiah Wedge wood, he was 
enabled to go to Germany to stud} T . He spent the most of his 
time at Gottingen, and acquired that knowledge of German 
philosoph} 7 and literature that influenced all his own subsequent 
work, as well as the quality of English t ought and of English 
literature since that time. On his return to England, he trans- 
lated Schiller's " Wallenstein ; " and soon afterward went to 
reside in the Lake district, with his friends, Wordsworth and 
Southey. He' had now become a conservative in theology and 
politics ; and he also fell into the habit of opium-eating, which 
gave a blight to the remainder of his life. He lost the power 
of persistent work ; was continually forming great literary pro- 
jects, which he soon dropped. In 1809, he wrote " The 
Friend." In 1816, he went to live with Mr. Gillman, a sur- 
geon at Highgate, and in his house he found a home for life. 
Here he wrote " Zapolya," a dramatic poem ; his " Statesman's 
Manual," " Lay Sermons," "Aids to Reflection," and "Biogra- 
phia Literaria." He died in 1834. 

3. Robert Southey, nearly two years younger than Cole- 
ridge, was born at Bristol, August 12, 1774, the son of an un- 
prosperous linen-draper. He was educated by help of his 
mother's maiden aunt, Miss Tyler, until 1788, when Miss Tyler, 
and an uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, chaplain to the English 
factoiy at Lisbon, sent him to Westminster School. He was 
expelled from the school for a jest on the head master's faith in 
floffffins, contributed to a school magazine called the " Flagel- 



To A.D. 1850.] ROBERT SOUTHEY. 625 

lant." His uncle Hill thought he had been hardly treated, and 
resolved that Robert Southey should still have justice done to 
his unusual abilities. He was sent, therefore, to Balliol College, 
Oxford, in 1792, soon after his father's death. There he dis- 
tinguished himself by his fervent zeal for the cause of the French 
Revolution, the general overthrow of tyrannies, and the re- 
establishment of the world on a right basis. In June, 1794, 
Coleridge came to him, and sympathized with all his aspirations, 
joined him afterwards at Bristol, was introduced to Robert 
Lovell, George Burnet, and other kindred spirits. In this year 
Southey published his revolutionary dramatic poem of " Wat 
Tyler," and joined Coleridge in his writing of " The Fall of 
Robespierre." The new associates agreed that as the old state 
of things in Europe would impede prompt settlement in social 
questions, the wisest thing the}' could possibly do would be to 
proceed to the New World, and there, on virgin soil, establish 
a community in which all should be equal and all good. From 
three Greek words meaning " all-equal-government," the}' called 
their proposed state a Pantisocracy. Wives, of course, would 
be needed, and there were the three Miss Flickers, eligible wives. 
One of these ladies was an actress, one kept a little school, one 
was a dressmaker. Lovell would marry one, Coleridge one, 
and Southey one. They would and the}' did. Sarah Flicker 
became Mrs. Coleridge, and Edith Flicker was to become Mrs. 
Southey, when aunt Tyler had been told of the young enthusi- 
ast's intentions. Aunt Tyler raged, and discarded Southey. 
Good-natured uncle Hill held by the youth, in whom he saw 
" every thing you could wish a young man to have, excepting 
common sense and prudence ; ' ' and as the Pantisocrats could 
not, for want of funds, get to the Susquehannah, he tempted 
him with the offer of a visit to Lisbon. Change of scene, and 
absence from Bristol, might suffice to cure his fever. Southey 
went with his uncle, but privately married Edith Fricker the 
day before he started. When he came home, in 1796, he 
claimed his wife, and at once began to seek his living as an 
indefatigable writer. He produced at Bristol his first epic, 
"Joan of Arc," and as he worked on with patient industry, 
and saw much to disenchant him, he became, in time, a sup- 



626 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

porter of the old order of things. In 1801, he published his 
second epic, "Thalaba." In 1804, he settled near Keswick, 
about fourteen miles from Wordsworth, and there he spent the 
remainder of his long life, dying in 1843. He was one of the 
most industrious writers that ever lived, and his productions 
included almost every form of literature in prose and verse. 
In 1805, he published " Madoc ; " in 1810, "The Curse of 
Kehama; " and in 1814, "Roderick, the Last of the Goths." 
Other poems of his are " Carmen Triumphale," and "A Vision 
of Judgment." In 1813, he was made poet-laureate. Among 
his prose works are "Book of the Church," "History of 
Brazil," " History of the Peninsular War," " Life of Wesley," 
" Life of Lord Nelson," " Colloquies on the Progress and Pros- 
pects of Societ} r ," and " The Doctor." 

4. Sir Walter Scott was born in 1771, and died in 1832. 
After studying at the High School and Universit}' of Edinburgh, 
he entered his father's law office, and was admitted to the bar 
in 1792. His heart was in literaiy work, though he wisely held 
to his profession as a means of livelihood. He trained himself 
for poetry by translations from the German, and by the com- 
position of ballads. In 1802-3, he published " The Minstrelsy 
of the Scottish Border ; " and in 1805, " The Lay of the Last 
Minstrel," by which he sprang into instant popularity. Then 
followed with great rapidity his other poems in the same vein : 
" Marmion," " The Lady of the Lake," " The Vision of Don 
Roderick," " Rokeby," "The Bridal of Triermain," "The 
Lord of the Isles," and "Harold the Dauntless." In 1814, 
he turned from poetry into the field of prose fiction, in which he 
at once achieved a renown surpassing that of any previous novel- 
ist in English literature. 

5. George Crabbe, who was born in 1754, and won repu- 
tation as a poet during the eighteenth century, continued his 
literar} T labors far imo our present period, and died in 1832. 
In early life, he suffered from povert}' ; and having gone to 
London, in 1780, as a literary adventurer, he there fell into 
great distress, from which he was rescued b}' the kindness of 
Edmund Burke. In 1781, he published "The Library," a 
poem, which met with success. He then took holy orders, and 



To A. D. 1850.] THOMAS CAMPBELL. ■ 627 

lie received in the course of his life several benefices. In 1783, 
his reputation was greatly increased 03- the publication of " The 
Village." In 1785, he published "The Newspaper;" and 
during the subsequent twenty-two 3-ears, he withdrew entirely 
from poetic work, giving himself up to the duties of his pro- 
fession. In 1807, he once more attracted attention as a poet 
by "The Parish Register;" in 1810, he published "The 
Borough," and, in 1812, "Tales in Verse." In 1819, ap- 
peared his last poem, " Tales of the Hall." His power, which 
is veiy great, consists in the minute portrayal of the joys and 
sorrows of persons in lowly life, their poverty, wretchedness, 
virtues, and crimes. 

6. Samuel Rogers, who was born in 1763, and who died 
in 1855, at the great age of ninety-two, was the son of a rich 
London banker; and upon his father's death, in 1793, he 
inherited the fortune which enabled him to keep a sort of lite- 
rary- court in London for more than half a century. He was 
carefully educated in private, and earl}- manifested his aptitude 
for literature. In 1786, he published " An Ode to Superstition, 
with Other Poems ; " and in 1792, " The Pleasures of Memory," 
upon which his poetic fame was established. In 1798, he pub- 
lished his " Epistle to a Friend, with Other Poems ; " in 1812, 
his " Voyage of Columbus ; " in 1813, his " Jacqueline ; " in 
1819, his " Human Life ; " and in 1822, his " Italy." Since his 
death, his "Table-Talk" has been published. 

7. Thomas Campbell was born in 1777, and died in 1844. 
He entered at the age of twelve the University of Glasgow, 
and distinguished himself by his fondness for Greek literature, 
and by his precocity in poetical composition. When but twenty- 
two years of age, he wrote his most famous poem, " The Pleas- 
ures of Hope," which was published in 1799, and raised him 
at once to high fame. He soon went to Germany for study 
and travel; and returned to Edinburgh in 1801, having pro- 
duced, during his absence, " Lochiel's Warning," "The Exile 
of Erin," and " Ye Mariners of England." In 1803 he removed 
to London, and for many 3'ears gained a livelihood as a hack 
writer. In 1809 he published "Gertrude of Wyoming," 
together with " Lord Ullin's Daughter," and "The Battle of 



628 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. (A.D. 1800 

the Baltic." His later poems were comparative failures, par- 
ticularly " Theodric," in 1824, and " The Pilgrim of Glencoe," 
in 1842. His prose writings are numerous, and include "Let- 
ters" descriptive of travel, Lives of Mrs. Siddons and of 
Petrarch, together with histories, and essays in literary criti- 
cism. 

8. Another poet whose work began in the eighteenth century 
and was continued during the larger part of the nineteenth was 
Walter Savage Lander. He was born in 1775, and died 
in 1864, and, like Rogers, inherited great wealth. He was a 
man of genius, and of great cultivation, particularly in the 
ancient classics ; but he had a violent temper, and was often 
overbearing and vindictive. His first publication was a small 
volume of poems in 1795 ; next came a long poem, " Gebir," 
in 1798 ; and next, " Count Julian," a traged}', in 1812. The 
latter brought him literary distinction. Between 1824 and 
1829, he published his most celebrated work, " Imaginary 
Conversations," five volumes, prose. In 1836, he published 
" A Satire on Satirists and Detractors ; " in 1839, his dramas, 
" Andrea of Hungary " and " Giovanna of Naples ; " in 1847, 
" Hellenics ; " in 1853, " The Last Fruit of an Old Tree ; " in 
1854, "Letters of an American; " and in 1858, "Dry Sticks 
Fagoted." He also made frequent contributions to the news- 
papers. A complete edition of his works has been published 
in seven volumes. 

9. Thomas Moore was born in Dublin in 1779. He died in 
England in 1852. After graduating at Trinity College, Dublin, 
in 1799 he entered upon the study of law in London. In 1800, 
he won his first literaiy success, and his literary nickname, by 
publishing a translation of the odes of Anacreon. In 1801, he 
published a volume of original poems, under the assumed name 
of Thomas Little. Having made a brief tour in the United 
States, he published, in 1806, his " Epistles, Odes, and Other 
Poems," founded upon his experience in America. From this 
time forward, his writings in prose and verse were a multitude. 
His most important publications are "Irish Melodies," " Sacred 
Songs, ' ' ' ' National Airs , " " Lalla Rookh , " " The Fudge Family 
in Paris," " Life of Sheridan," and " Life of Lord Byron." 



To A.D. 1850. | JOHN KEATS 629 

10. The poets thus far mentioned in this chapter were all in 
the field, when, in 1809, room was suddenly made among them 
for a young poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron, who pub- 
lished that year his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." 
He was born in London in 1788. He received his principal 

jBducation at Harrow and at Cambridge ; and in 1807 published 
his first volume of poems, " Hours of Idleness ; " by the con- 
temptuous review of which in " The Edinburgh Review," Byron 
was goaded to the composition of the powerful satire above 
mentioned. In June, 1809, he started upon a long journey in 
the East; and in Albania he began the composition of " Childe 
Harold," of which the first two cantos were published in 1812, 
and brought to Byron the highest contemporary fame. During 
the remainder of his life, his pen had little rest. In 1813 
came " The Giaour; " followed by " The Bride of Abyclos," 
"The Corsair," and "Lara." In 1816, he published "The 
Siege of Corinth," and " Parisina." In 1816, having separated 
from his wife, and incurred great public odium, he left England, 
never to return : and died in Greece in 1824. During these eight 
years, he added to "Childe Harold," wrote "The Prisoner of 
Chillon," "Manfred," "Beppo," "Mazeppa," "Don Juan," 
"Marino Faliero," " Sardanapalus," "Cain," "The Vision 
of Judgment," and many other works. 

11. Percy Bysshe Shelley, of an ancient and wealthy 
family, was born in 1792, and died by drowning in 1822. He 
began writing when very young. In 1810, he published " Zas- 
trozzi," and in 1811, " St. Irvyne ; or, the Rosicrucian," both 
romances in prose. At the age of seventeen, he was expelled 
from the University of Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on 
"The Necessit}' of Atheism." He soon became acquainted with 
Southey, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Godwin, Byron, Keats, and 
other men of letters. In 1813, he published " Queen Mab ; " 
and subsequently he wrote " Alastor ; or, the Spirit of Soli- 
tude," "The Revolt of Islam," "Prometheus Unbound," 
-The Cenci," "Adonais," "Hellas," "The Cloud," "The 
Sensitive Plant," and "To the Skylark." A complete edition 
of his works, in four volumes, was published in 1875. 

12. John Keats was born in London, probably in 1796. 



630 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

He was without worldly fortune, or the opportunity of high 
education. He had little Latin, and no Greek at all. He was 
apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1818, he published " Endymion," 
with other poems ; and the volume was so fiercely abused by 
some of the reviewers, that his early death is sometimes said 
to have been hastened by the shock thus given to him. His 
health was rapidly declining b}^ consumption ; and in 1820, he 
was obliged to go to Italy for a gentler climate. He died in 
Rome in the following } T ear. Before leaving England, he pub- 
lished several exquisite and splendid poems, particularly "Hy- 
perion," u Lamia," ' k The Eve of St. Agnes," and u Ode to 
the Nightingale." He dictated the epitaph upon his tomb: 
u Here lies one whose name was writ in water." The dying 
poet seems not to have dreamed of the great and imperishable 
renown that was to preserve his name from djing. 

13. We must group into smaller space our record of the other poets 
belonging to this glorious, creative era of English literature. Robert 
Bloomfield (1766-1823), an apprentice to a farmer, and without helps 
to education, wrote "The Farmer's Boy," "Wild Flowers," "Rural 
Tales, 1 ' "The Banks of the Wye," "Songs and Ballads," etc., the first 
two of which once had great popularity. "William Lisle Bowles (1762- 
1850) was a learned antiquary, and a prolific writer both of prose and 
verse. His most memorable work is his " Sonnets," a form of verse in 
which he greatly excelled. Mary Tighe (1774-1810) published in 1805 a 
poem called "Psyche," which was much read. James Montgomery 
(1771-1854), a journalist, acquired wide popular recognition by his 
hymns, and by several long poems, particularly "The Wanderer of 
Switzerland," "The West Indies," "The World before the Flood," and 
" Greenland." Robert Montgomery (1807-55), a clergyman, wrote long 
pietistic poems on " The Omnipresence of the Deity," " The Messiah," 
and " Satan." His reputation is now chiefly derived from Macaulay's 
contemptuous essay on his poetry. Henry Kirke "White (1785-1806) 
came to his death from imprudent devotion to study at Cambridge; and 
had great posthumous reputation on account of the publication of his 
verses and prose essays, edited by Southey. Reginald Heber (1783- 
1826) wrote, besides sermons and books of travel, "Poems and Transla- 
tions," 1812; and " Hymns," 1827. Some of the latter will last as long 
as our language lasts. Felicia Hemans (1794-1835) wrote "Dart- 
moor," "Siege of Valencia," "Songs of the CM," "Lays of Many 
Lands," "Songs of the Affections," etc. James Hogg (1770 or 1772- 
1835), known as "the Ettrick Shepherd," was a self-trained writer, and 
published, in 1807, "The Mountain Bard;" hi 18-10, "The Forest Min- 



To A.D. 1850.] JOHN KEBLE, AND OTHERS. 631 

steel;" and in 1813, "The Queen's Wake." He is a prominent person- 
age in "Noctes Ambrosianae." Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) 
wrote "The Bride's Tragedy," "The Improvisatore," "Death's Jest 
Book," "Dramatic Scenes and Fragments." John Keble (1792-1866) 
wrote "The Christian Year," which has probably been published in 
a hundred editions; also "Lyra Innocentium," and parts of "Lyra 
Apostolica." Ebenezer Elliott (1781-184,9), known as "the Corn-Law 
Rhymer," won his chief distinction as a writer of passionate and stirring 
lyrics at a time of great political excitement in England. Hartley- 
Coleridge (1796-1849), eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote 
essays for "Blackwood's Magazine," and "Biographia Borealis;" also 
"Poems," in which the sonnets are of special tenderness and beauty. 
Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-33), who is forever commemorated in 
Tennyson's "In Memoriam," wrote both poems and prose essays, which 
were printed, first, in 1834, and again in 1862. Letitia Elizabeth 
Landon (1802-38) became known by her initials, "L. E. L.," with 
which she signed her many poems, such as "The Troubadour," "The 
Venetian Bracelet," "The Golden Violet," and "The Vow of the 
Peacock." 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 
NOVELISTS AND DRAMATISTS. 

1. Sir Walter Scott. — 2. Prominence of the Novel as a Form of Literature. — 3. 
William Godwin; Maria Edgeworth ; Matthew Gregory Lewis; Amelia Opie; 
Jane Austen; Jane Porter; Anna Maria Porter; Barbara Holland; Mary 
Brunton.— 4. Mrs. Shelley; James Morier; Thomas Hope; Robert P.Ward; 
Theodore Hook; Thomas H. Lister; Lady Blessington ; Mrs. Trollope; Mary 
Russell Mitford; G. P. R. James; John Gait; William H. Ainsworth. — 5. 
Dramatists: Joanna Baillie; Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd ; James Sheridan 
Knowles. — 6. Six Greatest Novelists between 1830 and 1850: Captain Mar- 
ryat ; Lord Lytton ; Lord Beaconsfield ; Charlotte Bronte ; Charles Dickens ; 
William Makepeace Thackeray. 

1. English prose fiction, which, as an influential form of 
literature, received its first great impulse from the labors of 
Defoe, of Richardson, and of Fielding, received its second 
great impulse from the labors of Sir Walter Scott. When 
his metrical tales had begun to lose their influence before the 
growing fame of Byron, Scott broke with rhyme, and began, 
in 1814, with his first novel, " Waverley," to pour out his 
prose romances. At least one, often two, in a year, appeared 
for the next seventeen years without intermission, except in the 
single year 1830. Nowhere in print was Scott so much a poet 
as in the earlier of his novels. His bright, cheerful fane}', his 
quick humor, his honest warmth of feeling, which aroused every 
healthy emotion without stirring a passion, exercised, in these 
incessantly recurring novels, an influence as gradual, as sure, 
and as well fitted to its time, as that which had been exercised 
by Steele and Addison in constantly recurring numbers of 
the "Tatler" and "Spectator." There was a wide general 
public now able to fasten upon entertaining volumes. Scott 
widened it, and purified its taste. In him there was no form 
of romantic discontent. His world was the same world of 
genial sympathies, in which we may all live if we will, and do 

632 



To A.D. 1850.I MINOR NOVELISTS. 633 

live if we know it. He enjc^ed the real, and sported with the 
picturesque. As he felt, he wrote, frankly and rapidh'. Even 
his kindly Toryism was a wholesome influence. The Jacobites, 
so real to Defoe, amused the public now as the material of 
pleasant dreams ; and the sunlight of Scott's fane}' glistened 
upon rippling waters where the storm menaced wreck. Never, 
perhaps, was there a wholesomer English writer than he. 

2. The vast renown, and even the vast pecuniary reward, 
reaped by Scott from his novels, aided to bring the novel to 
the front, as the one form of literature in which nearly all 
writers in the nineteenth century should feel a desire to utter 
themselves, very much as was the case with the drama in the 
seventeenth century. An exhaustive list of the mere names of 
English writers who have written novels between 1800 and 1850 
would fill a great space in this book. We can only call atten- 
tion to those of chief significance. 

3. First, let us group together those who were writing novels in the 
years just before Scott published " Waverley." As far back as in 1794, 
William Godwin (1756-1836) published his powerful novel, " Caleb 
Williams;" which was followed, in 1799, by "St. Leon;" by "Fleet- 
wood," in 1805; by Mandeville," inl817; by "Cloudesley," in 1830; and 
by "Deloraine," in 1833. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) established 
her reputation as a novelist by "Castle Rackrent," in 1801. Her 
other novels are numerous, including " Tbe Absentee," " Belinda," 
"Patronage," "Harrington," and "Ormond." Her writings were 
greatly admired by Sir "Walter Scott. Matthew Gregory Lewis 
(1775-1818) published in 1795 his most celebrated work, "The Monk;" 
and in 1801, his "Tales of Wonder." Besides these, he wrote several 
dramas and poems. Amelia Opie (1769-1853) wrote many stories that 
have had great popularity, such as "The Ruffian Boy," "Temper," 
"Murder will Out," "The Father and Daughter," and "St. Valentine's 
Day." Jane Austen (1775-1817) showed great power as a delineator 
of common life and simple characters, in such novels as "Sense and 
Sensibility," "Emma," "Mansfield Park," " Pride and Prejudice," and 
"Persuasion." Jane Porter (1776-1850) published two novels that are 
still celebrated, " Thaddeus of Warsaw," in 1803, and "The Scottish 
Chiefs." in 1809. Besides these are "The Field of Forty Footsteps," 
"Sir Edward Seaward's Diary," and several more. With her sister, 
Anna Maria Porter (1780-1832), she wrote "Tales round a Winter's 
Hearth." This sister wrote, alone, a large number of novels; among 
which are "The Lakes of Killarney," in 1804; "A Sailor's Friendship 
and a Soldier's Love," in 1805; "The Hungarian Brothers," in 1807; 



634 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1800 

and " The Recluse of Norway," in 1814. Barbara Hofland (1770-1844) 
was a diligent writer, producing about seventy different works, mostly 
novels, which have had an enormous sale in England and America, as 
well as upon the European continent. Some of these are "Emily," 
"The Son of a Genius," "The Unloved One," "Adelaide," "Humili- 
ty," and "Tales of the Manor." Mary Brunton (1778-1818) pub- 
lished, in 1811, "Self-Control, " and, in 1814, "Discipline," two novels 
that at once gained great popularity. 

4. Among the novelists whose work began after the publication of 
"Waverley," the following are to be mentioned. Mrs. Shelley (1798- 
1851), second wife of the poet, published, in 1818, "Frankenstein;" in 
1823, "Valperga;" and, subsequently, "Lodore," "The Fortunes of 
Perkin Warbeck," "The Last Man," and "Falkner." James Morier 
(1780-1849) wrote "Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan," "Zohrab 
the Hostage," "Ayesha, the Maid of Kars," "The Banished Swa- 
bian," etc. Thomas Hope (about 1770-1831) acquired reputation by 
his "Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Modern Greek," published in 1819. 
Robert P. Ward (1765-1846) published, in 1825, "Tremaine: or, the 
Man of Refinement," and afterwards "De Vere; or, the Man of Inde- 
pendence," "De Clifford; or, the Constant Man," and "Chatsworth; or, 
the Romance of a Week." Other novelists of this time are Theodore 
Hook (1788-1841); Thomas Henry Lister (1801-42); Lady Bless- 
ington (1789-1849); Mrs. Trollope (1778-1863); Mary Russell Mit- 
ford (1786-1855); G. P. R. James (1801-60) John Gait (1779-1839); 
and "William Harrison Ainsworth (1805). 

5. Many of the novelists included in the foregoing list also wrote 
dramatic pieces. During the same period there were several other 
writers who are best known as dramatists. Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) 
published multitudes of tragedies and comedies, which are interesting 
and powerful as literature, but have had no prolonged success in actual 
representation. One of the most exquisite dramatic pieces of this cen- 
tury is "Ion," a tragedy, by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), 
who also wrote "The Athenian Captive," " Glencoe," and "The Cas- 
tilian." James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) wrote a great number 
of successful plays. 

6. Of the novelists who rose in England between the cul- 
mination of Sir Walter Scott's career and the middle of the 
nineteenth century, these six may be named as chiefs in merit 
and in reputation. Captain Frederick Marryat (1792- 
1848) greatly excelled in naval stories, and produced a long 
series of works, mairy of which still retain their great populari- 
ty. Of such are " Peter Simple," " Jacob Faithful," " Japhet 
in Search of a Father," and u Midshipman Easy." Lord 



To A. D. i S50.] WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 635 

Lytton, best known as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1805- 
1873), published his first novel, "Falkland," in 1827; from 
which time until his death, he was an extremely prolific and 
popular writer in many forms of literature, but pre-eminently 
so in that of the novel. Lord Beaconsfield (1805), under 
his name of Benjamin Disraeli, published his first novel, 
"Vivian Grey," in 1826, which has been followed by a long 
and famous series, including " Henrietta Temple," " Con- 
tarini Fleming," " Coningsby," "Tancred," and "Lothair." 
Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) published in 1847 "Jane 
Eyre," which has had extraordinaiy success in man}' lan- 
guages. In 1849, she published " Shirle} T ; " and in 1853, 
"Villette." After her death was published "The Profess- 
or;" also part of an unfinished novel, "Emma." Charles 
Dickens (1812-70) sprang into universal popularit}' by the 
publication of " The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club," 
in 1837 ; and he is still the most widely read novelist that Eng- 
land has produced. The titles of his principal novels, and the 
names of his leading characters, are household words among the 
English-speaking race. The name of one contemporary is 
commonly coupled with his, that of William Makepeace 
Thackeray (1811-63), to whom success came later in life and 
after harder struggle than it did to Dickens. His first success- 
ful work was " Vanity Fair," published in serial form in 1847- 
48. His most notable novels since then are "The History of 
Pendennis," " The Xewcomes," " The Virginians," and " The 
Adventures of Philip." 



CHAPTER XIX. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 

ESSAYISTS, SATIRISTS, HISTORIANS, 

AND BIOGRAPHERS. 

1. William Gifford,— 2. William Cobbett. — 3. Leigh Hunt. — 4. Charles Lamb.— 
5. William Hazlitt. — 6. Sydney Smith. — 7. John Wilson. — 8. Thomas DeQuin- 
eey. — 9. James and Horace Smith. — 10. Lord Jeffrey; Lord Brougham; Lord 
Maeaulay. — 11. John Foster. — 12. Thomas Hood. — 13. Douglas Jerrold. — 14. 
Thomas Carlyle. — 15. Historians: Henry Hart Milnian; James Mill; William 
Mitford; Connop Thirlwall; John Lingard ; Patrick Fraser Tytler; Henry 
Hallam ; George G rote; Thomas Arnold ; Earl Stanhope; Sir William Napier; 
Sharon Turner; Lord Maeaulay. — 16. Biographers: John Gibson Lockhart; 
William Boscoe ; Nathan Drake. 

1. William Gifford (1757-1826) published his first satire, 
"The Baviad," in 1791; his second satire, "The Mseviad," 
in 1795 ; and his third satire, "An Epistle to Peter Pindar," 
in 1800. He had a hand in " The Anti- Jacobin ; " translated 
Juvenal and Persius ; edited the works of Ben Jonson, Mas- 
singer, Ford, and Shirley; and was the first editor of "The 
Quarterly Review." 

2. William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a great journalist 
and pamphleteer. Reestablished in London, in 1801, "Por- 
cupine's Gazette," a morning paper; afterward he established 
"The Political Register." His writings were upon nearly all 
subjects of current interest, and had an enormous sale, espe- 
cially among the middle and lower classes. 

3. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) edited newspapers, and wrote 
poems, pla3 T s, stories, biographical sketches, and critical essay's, 
— his most characteristic and delightful work being in the 
latter form. 

4. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), a genius of rare quality, 
will be always remembered for his "Essays of Elia," as well 
as for his choice and penetrating criticisms upon the Shake- 
spearean dramatists. 

636 



To A.D. 1850. J ESSAYISTS. 637 

5. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) published "Essays on 
the principles of Human Action," ''Lectures on the English 
Poets," kw Lectures on the English Comic Writers," " Characters 
of Shakespeare's Plays," kw A View of the English Stage," 
"Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Eliza- 
beth," "Table-Talk," and " Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." He 
did many things well, but literary criticism best of all. 

6. Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was one of the founders of 
"The Edinburgh Review," and published in that periodical 
multitudes of essays; besides these, "Sermons," "Speeches," 
and "Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, to nry Brother 
Abraham who lives in the Country, by Peter Plymley." He 
was distinguished for wit, good sense, good feeling, logic, and 
eloquence. 

7. John Wilson (1785-1854), best known by his pen-name 
of Christopher North, wrote "The Isle of Palms, and Other 
Poems ; " " The City of the Plague, and Other Poems ; " many 
tales, — " Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," "The Trials 
of Margaret Lindsay," and kk The Foresters;" and the cele- 
brated papers in " Blackwood," under the titles of " Noctes 
Ambrosianae," and " The Recreations of Christopher North." 

8. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) first won notice by 
his "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," published in 
"The London Magazine," in 1821 ; and during the remainder 
of his life he wrote frequently for the magazines, reviews, and 
encyclopaedias, — his essays being remarkable for erudition, 
and for wealth of thought, fancy, humor, and st}'le. 

9. The brothers James Smith (1775-1839) and Horace 
Smith (1779 or 1780-1849) are best known for their burlesque 
imitations of popular authors, published, in 1812, under the title 
of " Rejected Addresses." 

10. Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850) joined with S} T dney Smith, 
Horner, Brougham, and others, in founding "The Edinburgh 
Review ; " and his man} T essa} r s therein published are admirable 
examples of acute literary criticism and of felicitous st}'le. 
His associate, Lord Brougham (1779-1868), was a man of 
rugged genius and of boundless energy, and, during a long and 
busy career as lawyer and politician, contributed many essa} r s 



638 MANUAL OF EXGLISE LITERATURE. [A.D 1800 

to "The Edinburgh Review." It was in the same periodical 
that Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) published in 1825 his essay 
on "Milton," followed by that long series of essays that have 
given to him his brilliant reputation in this department of 
letters. 

11. John Foster (1770-1843), a writer of great ingenuity 
and power, published essays ; - On Decision of Character." " On 
the Evils of Popular Ignorance," and many other subjects. 

12. Thomas Hood (1798-1845) wrote --TThims and Oddi- 
ties." the •• Comic Annual." t; Whimsicalities." and so forth, 
besides some small poems now everywhere famous either for 
pathos or for humor. 

13. Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857) wrote many brilliant 
plays and novels, and was specially renowned for his wit. He 
began his career as a compositor in a London printing-office, 
and ended it as an editor of k * Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper." 

14. A name of supreme authority and attraction, as essayist, 
satirist, biographer, and historian, is that of Thomas Carlyle 
(1795), who for fifty years has been a diligent writer, and. since 
the publication of his '• Sartor Resartus," a most influential 
one. Besides that book, his most memorable writings are " The 
French Revolution," " Past and Present." " The Life of John 
Sterling," and •■ History of Friedrich the Second, called Fred- 
erick the Great." 

15. The greatest historians in England during the first half 
of the nineteenth century were Henry Hart Milman (1791- 
1868). who wrote " The History of the Jews," ^The History 
of Christianity." and " History of Latin Christianity : " James 
Mill ( 1773-1836) . who wrote " The History of British India ; " 
'William Mitford (1744-1827), and Connop Thirlwall 
(1797-1875), each of whom wrote a •• History of Greece;" 
John Lingard (1771-1851). who wrote "A History of Eng- 
land; " Patrick Fraser Tytler (1791-1849). who wrote 
••The History of Scotland; " Henry Hallam (1777-1859), 
who wrote • • View of the State of Europe during the Middle 
Ages." " The Constitutional History of England," and ' k Intro- 
duction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth. Sixteenth, 
and Seventeenth Centuries;" G-eorge G-rote (1794-1871). 



To A.D. 1850.] BIOGRAPHERS. 639 

who wrote "History of Greece;" Thomas Arnold (1795- 
1842), who wrote " The History of Rome ; " Earl Stanhope 
(1805-1875) , who wrote a " Histoiy of the War of Succession in 
Spain," and a " History of England ; " Sir William Napier 
(1785-1860), who wrote a " History of the War in the Penin- 
sula; " Sharon Turner (1768-1847), who wrote " The History 
of England ; " and finally, highest in artistic skill and in pop- 
ular renown, Lord Macaulay, who wrote " The History of 
England." % 

16. Among English biographers for this period, probably the 
greatest is John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), who wrote 
11 Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart." Another 
very eminent biographer is William Roscoe (1753-1831), 
who wrote Lives of "Lorenzo de' Medici," and "Leo the 
Tenth." A noble specimen of biography is "Shakespeare 
and His Times," by Nathan Drake (1766-1836). 



CHAPTER XX. 

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 

SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, THEOLOGIANS, 

AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 

1. Scholars: Richard Porson ; Isaac Disraeli; Thomas F. Dibdin ; George L. Craik ; 
John Payne Collier. — 2. Philosophers: Dugald Stewart ; Thomas Brown; Sir 
James Mackintosh ; Sir William Hamilton ; Richard Whately. — 3. Theologians : 
Robert Hall; Thomas Chalmers ; Augustus William Hare ; Julius Charles Hare; 
Edward B. Pusey ; John Keble ; John Henry Newman ; Thomas Arnold ; Freder- 
ick D. Maurice ; Frederick W. Robertson. — 4. Men of Political Science: Jer- 
emy Bentham ; T. R. Malthus ; David Ricardo; Nassau W. Senior. —5. Men of 
Physical Science: Sir William Herschel ; Sir Humphry Davy; Michael Fara- 
day; Mary Somerville; Sir Charles Lyell ; Hugh Miller. 

1. Richard Porson (1759-1808) was an eminent Greek scholar, and 
edited Euripides and iEschylus. After his death were published his 
writings under the titles of " Porsoni Adversaria," and, "Tracts and 
Miscellaneous Criticisms." Isaac Disraeli (1766-1848) was remark- 
able for a minute and extensive knowledge of literature and literary 
men. His principal works are "Curiosities of Literature," "Calami- 
ties of Authors," " Quarrels of Authors," and "Amenities of Litera- 
ture." Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) was a champion and 
example of bibliomania. His most noted works are "Bibliomania; or, 
Book-Madness;" "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque 
Tour in France and Germany," "The Library Companion," and "An 
Introduction to the Knowledge of rare and valuable editions of the 
Greek and Latin Classics." George Lillie Craik (1799-1866) wrote 
" The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties," " History of Literature 
and Learning in England," "Romance of the Peerage," and "The 
English of Shakespeare." John Payne Collier (1789) is most noted 
for his writings upon topics connected with Shakespeare. He has pub- 
lished "History of English Dramatic Poetry," "Memoirs of the Prin- 
cipal Actors in Shakespeare's Plays," " New Facts regarding the Life 
of Shakespeare," an edition of " Shakespeare's Works," and "A Biblio- 
graphical Account of tlft Rarest Books in the English Language." 

2. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) published "Elements of the Phi- 
losophy of the Human Mind," "Philosophical Essays," "Outlines of 
Moral Philosophy," and " The Philosophy of the Active and Moral 
Powers of Man." Thomas Brown (1778-1820) published the " Phi- 

640 



To A.D. 1850.] PHILOSOPHERS AND THEOLOGIANS. 641 

losophy of Kant," "An Enquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect," 
and "Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind." Sir James Mack- 
intosh (1765-1832) published, besides works in history, biography, and 
politics, a "Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy," and "A Discourse on 
the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations." Sir William Hamilton 
(17S8-1S56) wrote "Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Educa- 
tion, and University Reform," "Lectures on Logic," and "Lectures on 
Metaphysics." Richard Whately (1787-1863) published a multitude 
of works, of which the following may be noted here: " The Use and 
Abuse of Party Feeling in Matters of Religion," "Elements of Logic," 
"Elements of Rhetoric," "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon," and 
" Introductory Lectures on Political Economy." 

3. Robert Hall (1764-1831) was remarkable for his eloquence in the 
pulpit, and for the wonderful powers of reasoning which his sermons 
displayed. His discourses were published in six volumes, in 1831-33. 
Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) was the other great pulpit-orator and 
profound theologian of that period. His works, which are very numer- 
ous, deal with physical science, political economy, mental philosophy, as 
well as with Biblical learning, and divinity. His most popular work is 
"Astronomical Discourses." The brothers Augustus William Hare 
(1792-1S34) and Julius Charles Hare (1796-1855), both clergymen, 
published " Guesses at Truth," besides many other works. A great 
movement in English thought, in the direction of Catholicity in the 
Anglican Church, was effected by the writings of Edward Bouverie 
Pusey (1800), of John Keble (1792-1866), and of John Henry New- 
man (1801). A movement in the direction of theological liberalism in 
tbe Anglican Church was promoted by the writings of Thomas Arnold 
of Rugby, of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-72), and of Fred- 
erick William Robertson (1816-53). 

4. The departments of political economy, jurisprudence, and social 
science, are represented by many great writers. Jeremy Bentham 
(1748-1832) published "A Fragment on Government," "An Introduc- 
tion to the Principles of Morals and Legislation," " The Rationale of 
Judicial Evidence," and many other works. Thomas Robert Malthus 
(1766-1834) published "An Essay on the Principle of Population," and 
other writings on political economy. David Ricardo (1772-1823) pub- 
lished works on the Currency, on Rent, and on "The Principles of 
Political Economy and Taxation." Nassau William Senior (1790- 
1864) published " Introductory Lectures on Political Economy," " On 
Foreign Poor-Laws and Laborers," and " Treatise on Political Econo- 
my." 

5. In physical science, the great writers were Sir William Herschel 
(1738-1822); Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829); Michael Faraday 
(1794-1867); Mary Somerville (1780-1872); Sir Charles Lyell (1797- 
1875); and Hugh Miller (1802-1856). 



CHAPTER XXI. 

SECOND HALF OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 
CONCLUSION. 

1. Ora studies upon English literature, beginning with Casd- 
mon in the seventh century, have now come to their necessary 
end in that portion of the nineteenth centuiy in which we live, 
and in which the actors and the writers are ver}' near to us, 
and are covered by the dust of contemporary conflicts and by 
the mist of contemporary opinions. We are upon the battle-field 
itself ; the battle is still going on around us ; we see here and 
there noble soldiers fighting bravely, and doing grand deeds ; 
but in the trampling of so man}' feet, in the shouts of so mam- 
voices, in the hurrying this way and that of armed and of dis- 
armed hosts, w'e cannot tell either just what all these movements 
mean, or just how this particular battle will end, or just what 
is the measure of praise or of blame that should be given to 
each one who is having a hand in it. 

2. Some indication of the substance of English literature 
since the middle of this century may be gathered from the 
following record in the form of Annals : — 

1850. Alfred Tennyson becomes Laureate, In Memoriam. Eobert 
Browning, Christmas-eve and Easter-day. Dickens, David Copperfield ; 
Household Words established. Thackeray, The Kickleburys on the 
Rhine, Rebecca and Rowena. Leigh Hunt, Autobiography. Douglas 
Jerrold, The Catspaw. Harriet Martineau, History of England during 
the Thirty Years' Peace. Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Bay Pamphlets. 
Elizabeth C. G-askell, Moorland Cottage. E. B. Lytton, Harold. Thomas 
Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book. Alexander Dyce. Edition of Mar- 
lowe. Wilkie Collins, Antonina. Sydney Dobell, Tlie Roman. Francis 
W. Newman, Phases of Faith. F. D. Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical 
Philosophy, Part i. Charles Merivale, History of the Romans under the 
Empire, 7 vols. (1850-61). 

1851. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows. John 
642 



To A.D. 1850.] ANNALS. 643 

Raskin, The Stones of Venice. Thomas Carlyle, Life of John Sterling. 
Arthur Helps, Companions of My Solitude. Douglas Jerrold, Betired 
from Business. W. Hepworth Dixon, William Penn. E. B. Lytton, 
Not so Bad as We Seem. J. O. Halliwell, Edition of Shakespeare. 
Robert Chambers, Life and Works of Burns. W. E. Gladstone, Two 
Letters on Neapolitaji State Prosecutions. Charles Kingsley, Yeast. 
G. L. Craik, The English Language. Richard Chenevix Trench, On the 
Study of Words. 

1852. Thackeray, Esmond. Anna Jameson, Legends of the Madonna. 
Dickens, Child '.s- History of England. Wilkie Collins, Basil. 13. Disraeli, 
Lord George Bentinck: a Political Biography. John Earl Russell, 
Memoirs of Thomas Moore. W. Hepworth Dixon, Robert Blake. Charles 
Reade, Peg Woffington. Charles Kingsley, Phaeton. A. H. Layard, 
Nineveh and Babylon. Henry Morley, Life of Bernard Palissy of 
Saintes. 

1853. Charlotte Bronte', Villette. Macaulay, Speeches. Dickens, 
Bleak House. Thackeray, English Humorists. Sydney Dobell, Balder. 
Leigh Hunt, Religion of the Heart. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, Cranford, 
Ruth. Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, Poems. E. B. Lytton, 
My Novel. Charles Knight, Once upon a Time. Michael Faraday, Lec- 
tures on Non-Metallic Elements. Charles Kingsley, Hypatia. Charles 
Reade, Christie Johnstone. 

1854. Dickens, Hard Times. John Forster, Life of Goldsmith (en- 
larged edition). W. E. Aytoun, Firmilian. Douglas Jerrold, A Heart 
of Gold. Robert Bell, Annotated Edition of the Poets begun. H. H. 
Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vols, iii., iv. Gerald Massey, 
Ballad of Babe Christabel. William Allingham, Day and Night Songs. 
Thomas Henry Huxley, Educational Value of Natural History. Rich- 
ard Owen, Structure of Skeleton and Teeth. F. D. Maurice, Moral and 
Metaphysical Philosophy. John Doran, Table Traits. John Ruskin, 
Lectures on Architecture and Painting. 

1855. Robert Browning, Men and Women. Alfred Tennyson, Maud. 
Dickens, Little Dorrit. Thackeray, The Newcomes, The Rose and the 
Ring. G. H. Lewes, Life of Goethe. Arthur Helps, The Spanish Con- 
quest of America (1855-G1). Macaulay, History of England, vols, iii., iv. 
Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, Westward Ho. A. P. Stanley, Sinai and 
Palestine. . George Macdonald, Within and Without : a Dramatic Poem. 
George Meredith, Shaving of Shagpat. Leigh Hunt, The Old Court 
Suburb, Stories in Verse. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, North and South. 
Anthony Trollope, The Warden. Matthew Arnold, Poems, 2d series. 
Charles Shirley Brooks, Aspen Court. Saturday Review established. 

1856. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. W. E. Aytoun, 
Both-well. David Masson, Essays, Biographical and Critical. Alexander 
Dyce, Edition of Shakespeare. J. O. Halliwell, Edition of Marston. J. 



644 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. (A.D. 1850 

A. Froude, History of England from Fall of Wolsey to Death of Eliza- 
beth, vols, i., ii. Thackeray, Miscellanies. Dinah Maria Mulock (Craik), 
John Halifax. Edward A. Freeman, History and Conquests of the Sara- 
cens. 

1857. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days. Elizabeth C. Gas- 
kell, Life of Charlotte Bronte. Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers. 
Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England. Charles 
Kingsley, Tivo Years Ago. Charles Reade, Never Too Late to Mend. 

1858. Thackeray, The Virginians. " George Eliot," Scenes of Cleri-, 
col Life. John Forster, Historical and Biographical Essays. Thomas 
Carlyle, Life of Friedrich II., vols, i., ii. Anthony Trollope, Doctor 
Thome. James A. Froude, History of England, vols, iii., iv. Arthur 
Helps, Oulita the Serf: a Tragedy. Matthew Arnold, Merope : a Tra- 
gedy. E. B. Lytton, What will he Do with It? Robert Chambers, 
Domestic Annals of Scotland. William Morris, Defence of Guinevere, 
and other Poems. W. E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric 
Age. Adelaide Anne Procter, Legends and Lyrics. 

1859. "George Eliot," Adam Bede. Alfred Tennyson, Idyls of the 
King. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Darwin, Origin of 
Species. Sir William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic. 
Anthony Trollope, The West Indies. David Masson, Life of Milton, 
vol. i. ; British Novelists. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. John Earl 
Russell, Life of C. J. Fox. 

1860. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems before Congress. " George 
Eliot," The Mill on the Floss. G. H. Lewes, Physiology of Common 
Li f e. John Forster, Arrest of the Five Members. Shirley Brooks, The 
Gordian Knot. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. Macaulay, Mis- 
cellaneous Writings ; History of England, vol. v. James A. Froude, His- 
tory of England, vols, v., vi. Charles Reade, The Cloister and the 
Hearth. 

1861. "George Eliot," Silas Marner. Dickens, Great Expectations. 
Thackeray, The Four Georges, Lovel. Anthony Trollope, Framley 
Parsonage. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford. W. E. Aytoun, 
Norman Sinclair. Charles Knight, Popidar History of England (1858- 
62). Earl Stanhope, Life of Pitt. Theodore Martin, Translation of 
Catullus. 

1862. Thackeray, Adventures of Philip, Roundabout Papers. Thomas 
Carlyle, Life of Friedrich II., vol. iii. E. B. Lytton, A Strange Story. 
Sir Henry Taylor, St. Clement's Eve. F. D. Maurice, Claims of the Bible 
and of Science. David Gray, The Luggie, and other Poems. Caroline 
E. Norton, The Lady of Gar aye. Jean Ingelow, Poems. Mrs. Brown- 
ing's Last Poems. John William Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of 
Joshua Examined, 5 Parts (1861-65). Theodore Martin, Translation of 
Dante's Vita Nuova. Charles Darwin, Fertilization of Orchids. 



To A.D. 1878.] ANNALS. 645 

1863. "George Eliot," Romola. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence 
as to Man's Place in Nature. John Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Mode 
of Motion. Edward A. Freeman, History of Federal Government, vol. i. 
Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies. A. W. Kinglake, History of the 
Invasion of the Crimea, vols, i., ii. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, Sylvia's Lovers. 
John Keble, Life of Bishop Wilson. A. P. Stanley, History of the Jewish 
Church. Florence Nightingale (b. 1820), Notes on Hospitals. George 
Macdonald, David Elginbrod. 

1864. Alfred Tennyson, Enoch Arden. Robert Browning, Dramatis 
Personal. John Forster, Life of Sir John Eliot. Algernon Charles Swin- 
burne, Atlanta in Calydon. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vitd 
Sua. William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland. G. H. 
Lewes, Aristotle. Thomas Carlyle, Life of Friedrich II., vol. iv. E. B. 
Fusey, Lectures on Daniel, An Eirenicon. John William Kaye, History 
of the Sepoy War. John Doran, Their Majesties' Servants. Henry 
Morley, English Writers before Chaucer. 

1865. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. Algernon Charles Swinburne, 
Chastelard. John Stuart Mill, Comte and Positivism. Fortnightly 
Review established. Thomas Carlyle, Life of Friedrich II., vols, v., vi. 
Elizabeth C. Gaskeil, Wives and Daughters. W. H. Dixon, The Holy 
Land. F. D. Maurice, Conflict of Good and Evil in Our Day. George 
Grote, Plato. 

1866. "George Eliot," Felix Holt. Lord Lytton, The Lost Tales of 
Miletus. James A. Froude, History of England, vols, ix., x. Wilkie 
Collins, Armadale. Matthew Arnold, New Poems. Bryan W. Procter, 
Charles Lamb : a Memoir. Christiana Rossetti, The Prince's Progress, 
etc. Francis Turner Palgrave, Essays on Art. 

1867. William Morris, Life and Death of Jason. Edward A. Free- 
man, History of the Norman Conquest, vol. i. Thackeray, Denis 
Duval. Jean Ingelow, A Story of Doom. G. H. Lewes, Biographical 
History of Philosophy (enlarged edition). Thomas Carlyle, Shooting 
Niagara, and After? W. H. Dixon, New America. Theodore Martin, 
Memoir of W. E. Aytoan. Matthew Arnold, Study of Celtic Literature. 
James A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects. John Tyndall, 
Sound. Augusta Webster, A Woman Sold, etc. Henry Maudsley, The 
Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. John Hill Burton, History of 
Scotland, vols, i.-iv. Henry Morley, English Writers from Chaucer to 
Dunbar. 

1868. " George Eliot," The Spanish Gypsy : a Poem. Robert Brown- 
ing, The Ring and the Book. William Morris, The Earthly Paradise. 
Gerald Massey, Shakespeare's Sonnets Interpreted. Edward A. Freeman, 
History of the Norman Conquest, vol. ii. W. H. Dixon, Spiritual Wives. 
A. P. Stanley, Memorials of Westminster Abbey. 

1869. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. Edward A. Freeman, 



646 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1850 

History of the Norman Conquest, vol. iii. John Forster, Life ofW.S. 
Landor. Harriet Martineau, Biographical Sketches. W. H. Dixon, Her 
Majesty's Tower, vols, i., ii. 

1870. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Brood. John Stuart 
Mill, The Subjection of Women. Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Prot- 
estantism. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems. Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay 
Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews. John Henry Newman, Miscellanies. 

1871. Robert Browning, Balaustioii's Adventure, Prince Hohenstiel- 
Schwangau. Robert Buchanan, Napoleon Fallen: a Lyrical Drama. 
Lord Lytton, The Coming Race. David Masson, Life of Milton, vol. ii. 
W. H. Dixon, Her Majesty' 's Tower, vols, iii.; iv. Benjamin Jowett, 
The Dialogues of Plato translated into English, with Analyses and In- 
troductions. Charles Kingsley, At Last : a Christmas in the West Indies. 
John Morley, Voltaire. A. C. Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise. An- 
thony Trollope, Ralph the Heir. 

1872. "George Eliot," Middlemarch. Alfred Tennyson, Gareth and 
Lynette. Robert Browning, Fiflne at the Fair. William Morris, Love 
is Enough. George Grote, Aristotle, edited by Alexander Bain and 
George Croom Robertson. William Chambers, Memoir of Robert Cham- 
bers. John Forster, Life of Dickens, vols, i., ii. Edward A. Freeman, 
History of the Norman Conquest, vol. iv. James A. Froude, The Eng- 
lish in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. Charles Darwin, Expression 
of the Emotions. 

1873. Lord Lytton, Kenelm Chillingly. Anthony Trollope, Australia 
and New Zealand. Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen. John Morley, Rous- 
seau. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma. Robert Browning, Red 
Cotton Nightcap Country. David Masson, Life of Milton, vol. iii. Wal- 
ter N. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance. 

1874. George Long, Decline of the Roman Republic. William Stubbs, 
Constitutional History of England, vols, i., ii. W. H. S. Ralston, Early 
Russian History. John Richard Green, A Short History of the English 
People. J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece. Theodore Martin, Life 
of the Prince Consort, vol. i. David Masson, Drummond of Hawthornden. 
W. T. Jevons, Principles of Science. Edward A. Freeman, Comparative 
Politics. Henry Sedgwick, The Methods of Ethics. Mrs. M. #. Fawcett, 
Tcdes on Political Economy. S. Baring-Gould, The Lost and Hostile 
Gospels. Frances Power Cobbe, The Hopes of the Human Race, Here 
and Hereafter. David Livingstone, Last Journals. Augustus J. C. 
Hare, Days near Rome. Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library. John Mor- 
ley, On Compromise. Miss Thackeray, Toilers and Spinsters. William 
Black, A Princess of Thule. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding 
Crowd. G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind. "George Eliot," 
The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems. 

1875. Adolphus William Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature 



ToA.D. 1878.] ANNALS. - 647 

to the Death of Queen Anne. J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy. 
Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon. Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible. 
A. B. Grosart, The Prose Works of Wordsworth. Sir C. W. Dilke, Papers 
of a Critic, with a Biographical Sketch. Dr. Schliemann, Troy and its 
Remains. Alfred Tennyson, Queen Mary. William Morris, The JEneids 
of VirgU. D. G. Rossetti, Dante and his Circle. Robert Browning, 
Aristophanes' Apology. Sir Arthur Helps, Social Pressure. John Fors- 
ter, The Life of Jonathan Swift. 

1876. Alfred Tennyson, Uarold. Robert Browning, Pacchiarotto, 
and how he worked in Distemper, and other Poems. William Black, 
Madcap Violet. " George Eliot," Daniel Deronda. Thomas Hardy, The 
Hand of Ethelberta. Justin McCarthy, Dear Lady Disdain. George 
Macdonald, Thomas Wingfold, Curate. Edward A. Freeman, History 
of the Norman Conquest in England (completed). George Rawlinson, 
Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy : History of the Sassanians. A. P. Stan- 
ley, History of the Jewish Church, 3d series. Leslie Stephen, History of 
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and Hours in a Library, 2d 
series. G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. I. Tod- 
hunter, William Whewell. J. P. Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece. 
A. R. Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals. W. E. Glad- 
stone, Homeric Synchronism. Professor Jebb, Attic Orators. I. B. 
Mozley, Sermons. Edward Dowden, Poems. J. E. Thorald Rogers, 
Epistles, Satires, and Epigrams. I 

1877. S. R. Gardiner, The Personal Government of Charles I. Sir 
Thomas Erskine May, History of Democracy in Europe. Sir John Bow- 
ring, Autobiographical Recollections. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Let- 
ters to R. H. Home. Matthew Arnold, Last Essays on the- Church and 
Religion. John Keble, Occasional Papers and Reviews. J. C. Shairp, On 
Poetical Interpretation of Nature. George H. Lewes, The Physical Basis 
of Mind. Robert Buchanan, The Shadow of the Sword. Connop Thirl- 
wall, Remains, Literary and Theological. James Martineau, Hours of 
Thought on Scripture Things. M. Betham-Edwards, A Year in Western 
France. Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. W. H. 
Mai lock, The New Republic. C. B. Cayley, The Riad of Homer Homomet- 
rically Translated. Edward Caird, A Critical Account of the Philosophy 
of Kant. G. H. Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind. Grant Allen, 
Physiological ^Esthetics. Edward A. Freeman, The Ottoman Power in 
Europe. James A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, 3d series. 
Tom Taylor, Historical Dramas. A. P. Stanley, Addresses and Ser- 
mons. T. H. Huxley, American Addresses. Austin Dobson, Proverbs 
in Porcelain. Aubrey De Yere, Antar and Zara, The Fall of Rosa. C. M. 
Ingleby, Shakespeare ; the Man and the Book. Robert Browning, The 
Agamemnon of zEschylus. 

1878. R. A. Proctor, Myths and Marvels of Astronomy. John Richard 
Green, History of the English People, vols, i., ii. Augustus J. C. Hare, 



A 



648 MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A. D. 1850 

Walks in London. Thomas Brassey, Lectures on the Labor Question. 
S. Baring-Gould. Origin and Development of Beligious Belief. F. W. 
Farrar. Eternal Hope. J. Norman. Lockyer. Star-gazing, Past and 
Present Alfred R. Wallace, Tropical Nature and Other Essays. Ed- 
ward Dowden, Shakespeare. John A. Symonds, Many Moods. W. H. 
Mallock, Lucretius. The New Paul and Virginia. Henry Fawcett. Free 
Trade and Protection. W. E, H. Lecky. History of England in the 
Eighteenth Century, vols. i.. ii. David Masson. Life of Milton, vols iv.. v. 
John Morley. Diderot. A. C. Swinburne. Poems and Ballads, 2d series. 
R. K. Haweis, Arrows in the Air. Spencer Walpole, A History of Eng- 
land from the Conclusion of the Great War o/lS15. TT. E. Gladstone, A 
Prim er of Horn er. 

3. A poet who sings to us still, sang in his youth of the life 
and work of men. In the second of his two poems, " Paracel- 
sus " and " Sordello," Robert Browning wrote : 

i; God has conceded two sights to a man. — 
One of men's whole work, time's completed plan; 
The other of the minute's work, man's first 
Step to the plan's completeness." 

He taught, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning — the best Eng- 
lish poetess — afterwards taught, in "Aurora Leigh." that we 
must be content to do our day's work in our day, and the more 

quietly for the far vision of what may be. which should include 

conviction that 

"no earnest work 
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak, 
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much, 
It is not gathered as a grain of sand 
To enlarge the sum of human action used 
For carrying out God's ends." 

Alfred Tennyson, in his " In Memoriam." has based upon a 
human love a strain that rises step by step from the first grief 
of the bereaved to the full sense of immortality and of the up- 
ward labor of the race of man. each true soul being 

" a closer link 
Betwixt us and the crowning race 

Of those that, eye to eye. shall look 
On knowledge." 

Tennyson's "Idyls of the King" is one great allegory of 
a divine voice in each man's soul that should be king over 



To A.D. 1878.] COXCLUSIOX. 649 

his passions and desires. Then Charles Dickens sought 
to undo wrong and quicken good will among men ; William 
Makepeace Thackeray attacked the petty vanities and 
insincerities of life, and with a cynical air upheld an ideal 
opposite as his own inmost simplicity and kindliness to the 
life of the men who scorn their neighbors and consider them- 
selves worldly wise. Now, too, George Eliot, in all her novels, 
instils her own faith in "plain living and high thinking," 
by showing that it is well in life to care greatly for something 
worthy of our care ; choose worth}' work, believe in it with all 
our souls, and labor to live through inevitable checks and 
hindrances, true to our best sense of the highest life we can 
attain. If Thomas Carlyle involves more in his condemna- 
tion of the times than may deserve his censure, his war is the 
true war of his century, with the host of false conventionalities 
that yet remain, with all that stands in the way of the work 
now chiefly left for us to do. "Men speak," he says, "too 
much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go 
how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a 
life of his own to lead? One life, a little gleam of time between 
two eternities, no second chance to us forevermore. It were 
well for us not to live as fools and simulacra, but as wise and 
realities. The world's being saved will not save us, nor the 
world's being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves : 
there being great merit here in the duty of staying at home. 
And on the whole, to say the truth, I never heard of worlds 
being saved in an}' other way. That mania of saving worlds 
is itself a piece of the eighteenth century with its wind}' senti- 
mentalism : let us not follow it too far." 



INDEX. 



A. 

Actors and Theatres, 255-258. 

Addison, Joseph, 446, 511, 512, 529, 530, 531, 
536, 539, 547, 598, 632; his life, 518, 519, 
520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527; his 
Account of the Poets, 447, 518,519; his 
Pax Europae Reddita, 520; his Musae 
Anglicanae, Letter from Italy, 521; his 
Dialogues on Ancient Medals, 522; his 
Campaign, Remarks on Italy, 523; his 
Rosamond, 524, 529; the Tatler, 524, 525, 
590, 632; the Spectator, 524, 525, 529, 538, 
590, 603, 632; his Drummer, 527, 528; his 
Cato, 512, 527, 575. 

^lfric, 29, 30, 62; his Homilies, Colloquy, 
Glossary, 29 ; his translation of portions 
of the Bible, 30. 

Ainsworth, William Harrison, 631. 

Akenside, Mark, his Pleasures of Imagina- 
tion, 603. 

Alcuin, 24, 25. 

Aldhelm, 18, 22, 23. 

Alexander, William, his plays, 298. 

Alfred, King, his life, 24-28, 30: his trans- 
lation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 25; 
of Orosius's Universal History, 25, 26; of 
Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, 27; 
his Gregory's Book on the Care of the 
Soul, 27. 

Alfred of Beverley, 39. 

Allen, Grant, 647. 

Allingham, William, 643, 645. 

Andre, Bernard, his Life of Henry VH., 146. 

Andrew of Wyntoun, 121. 

Andrewes, Lancelot, his Sermons, 339, 340. 

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the, 20, 26, 30. 

Arbuthnot, John, 531, 542, 543, 547; his Ex- 
amination of Woodward's Account of the 
Deluge, Law is a Bottomless Pit, Memoirs 
of Scriblerus, 531. 

Armstrong, John, his Art of Preserving 
Health. 549. 

Arnold, Matthew, 643, 644, 645, 646, 647. 

, Dr. Thomas, 639, 641 ; his History of 

Rome, 639. 

Arthurian Romance, 38, 40, 42-44. 

Ascham, Roger. 230; his life, 208-212; his 
Toxophilus, 209; his Report and Dis- 
course of the Affairs and State of Ger- 
many, etc., 210; his Schoolmaster, 211, 
212, 213. 

Ashmole, Elias, his Theatrum Chemicum 
Britannicum, Fasciculus Chemicus, and 
other works, 469. 

Athelard of Bath, 46-48. 



Atterbury, Francis, his Sermons and Dis- 
courses, Miscellaneous Works, 562. 

Aubrey, John, his Miscellanies, Natural 
History and Antiquities of the County of 
Surrey, 482. 

Augusdne, his De Civitate Dei, 25. 

Aungervyle, Richard, 56-59; his Philobi- 
blon, 56, 58, 59. 

Austen, Jane, her novels, 633. 

Avesburv, Robert of, his De Mirabilibus 
Gestis Edwardi 111., 39. 

Aytoun, W. E., 643, 644. 



B. 



Bacon, Francis, 189, 195, 272, 275, 346, 366, 
414, 456, 462, 469, 473, 477, 503; his life, 
354-362; his Temporis Partus Masculus, 
355; his Unity in Religion, 356, 359; his 
Essayes, 357-359; his Apologie, 359; his 
Proficience and Advauncement of Learn- 
ing, 359, 360, 362; his Instauratio Magna, 
360, 361, 362, 364; his Cosjitata et Visa, 
361; his Novum Organum, 361, 362, 363; 
his History of the Raigne of K. Henry 
VII., History of Life and Death, 362; his 
Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis, Sil- 
va Silvarum, Scala Intellectus, Prodromi, 
Active Science, 362, 363, 364; his philoso- 
phy, 364, 365. 

, Roger, his life, 48-50; his Opus Majus, 

Opus Minus, Opus Tertium, 49, 50, 364. 

Baillie, Joanna, her tragedies and comedies, 
634. 

Balades, 99. 

Baldwin, William, his Treatise of Moral 
Philosophy, version of the Song of Solo- 
mon, 232; A Mirror for Magistrates, 231, 
232, 233-235, 303, 304. 

Bale, John, his Vocation to the Bishopric of 
Ossory, etc., 220; his Scriptorum Illus- 
trium Majoris Britannia? Catalogus, 220, 
221. 

Ballads. Robin Hood, 122-124. 

Barbauld, Anna Letitia, her Eighteen Hun- 
dred and Eleven, 614. 

Barbour, John, 99, 106; his History of Scot- 
tish Kings, Lives of Saiuts, 106 ; his Bruce, 
106, 107. 

Barclay, Alexander, his Ship of Fools, 177, 
178; his other writings, 178. 

, Robert, his Truth Cleared from Calum- 
nies, Apology for the True Christian Di- 
vinity, 498. 

Baring-Gould, S., 646, 648. 



651 



652 



INDEX. 



Barrow, Isaac, 470; his sermons' and 
works, 499, 500. 

Bath, Athelard of, 46; his Quaestiones 
Naturales, 46, 47; his De Eodem et 
Diverso, 47, 48. 

Baxter, Richard, 370; his life, 492, 493, 495; 
his Saints' Everlasting Rest, Call to the 
Unconverted, 493; his Holy Common- 
wealth, 462, 493. 

Beattie, James, his Poems and Transla- 
tions, Essay on Truth, Minstrel, 607. 

Beaumont, Francis, 189, 276, 288,294; his 
Paraphrase of Ovid, 294; his joint plays 
with Fletcher, 295-297, 401 ; their Knight 
of the Burning Pestle. 296. 

Beckford, William, his Vathek, 602. 

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 631, 642; his 
Bride's Tragedy and other works, 631. 

Bede, 14; his life, 22-24, 26, 38, 62; his 
Nature of Things, 22; his Ecclesiastical 
History, 23, 25, 346. 

Behn, Aphra, 426, 436, 452; her life. 428- 
430 ; her Oroonoko, 429, 452 ; her Rover 
and other works, 429. 

Bell, Robert. 643. 

Bellenden, John, his translation of Boece, 
or History and Chroniklis of Scotland, 
translation of Livy, Prohemc of the Cos- 
mographe, 147. 

Benedict, his Rule of a Monastic Life, 28. 

Bentham, Jeremy, his works on govern- 
ment. 641. 

Bentley, Richard, his Epistola ad Millium, 
Epistles of Phalaris, Editions of Homer, 
Phaedrus, Terence, Paradise Lost, 556. 

Beowulf, 11, 17, 18, 19, 21. 

Berkeley, George, his New Theory of Vis- 
ion, Principles of Human Knowledge, 
Alciphron, 556. 

Berners, Juliana, her Book of Hunting, 
Art of Hawking, Laws of Arms, 121. 

, Lord, his translation of Froissart's 

Chronicle, of the Golden Book of Aure- 
lius, 148. 

Beveridge, William, his sermons, 501. 

Beverley, Alfred of, his abridgment of Geof- 
frey of Monmouth's Chronicle, 39. 

Bibles, English, Wiclifs, 108, 109; Cover- 
dale's, 144, 145; Matthew's, 145; Crom- 
well's, 145; the Great, 145; Taverner's, 
145; Cranraer's, 146, 199; Geneva, 198; 
Bishops', 198. 

Black, William, 646, 647. 

Blacklock, Dr. Thomas, 612. 

Blackmore, Sir Richard, 447, 510, 512, 537 ; 
his Prince Arthur, 510, 511, 512; his King 
Arthur, Paraphrases of Portions of the 
Bible, Satire on Wit, Collection of Poems, 
and other works, 511. 

Blackstone, Sir William, his Commentaries 
on the Laws of England, 597. 

Blair, Robert, his Grave, 552. 

Blenerhasset, Thomas, A Mirror for Magis- 
trates, 234. 

Blessington, Lady, 634. 

Bloomheld, Robert, his Farmer's Boy and 
other poems, 630. 

Boccaccio, 82, 83, 95, 447 ; his stanza, 78, 79; 
his Teseide, 80, 95; his Filostrato, 84; his 
Decameron, 92. 93, 95, 96, 102, 118, 176, 
195, 212; his F;>lls of Illustrious Men, 87, 
97, 118, 232. 



Bodenham, John, his Politeuphuia, 222, 
223; his England's Helicon, 228. 

Bodley, Sir Thomas, 339, 341. 

Boece, Hector, ^his History of the Scots, 
146, 147. 

Boethius, 27, 77 ; his Consolation of Philos- 
ophy, 27, 77. 

Boileau, his L'Art Poetique, 399, 400, 536. 

Bolingbroke, Lord, 529, 544, 558, 559, 598; 
his Craftsman, Parties, Human Knowl- 
edge, Philosophical Writings, 559. 

Boswell, James, his Life of Johnson, 593. 

Bourne, Vincent, his Thyrsis et Chloe, 551. 

Bowles, William Lisle, bis Sonnets, 630. 

Bowring, Sir Thomas, 647. 

Boyle. Robert, 463, 467. 468, 484; his life, 
464— J66; his Seraphic Love, New Experi- 
ments Physico-Mechanical, 464; his Phy- 
siological Essays, Sceptical Chemist, 
small treatises on Experimental Natural 
Philosophy, Colors. Style of the Holy 
Scriptures, Saltness of the Sea. 465 : his 
Excellency of Theology, Reconeilable- 
ness of Reason and Religion. 465. 

Bracton, Henry of, his Upon the Laws and 
Customs of England, 51. 

Brady, Nicholas, 453. 

Bramhall, Dr., his Catching of Leviathan, 
458. 

Brassey, Thomas, 648. 

Brome, Alexander. 322. 

Bromyard, John of, his Sumraa Predican- 
tiura, 125. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 635, 643; her Jane Eyre 
and other novels, 635. 

Brooke, Arthur, bis translation of Ban^ 
dello's Romeo and Juliet. 195. 

Brooks, Charles Shirley, 643, 644. 

Broome, William, 540, 542: his translation 
of Homer, Miscellaneous Poems. 540. 

Brown, Thomas, his satires, plays, and 
other works, 455. 

, Dr. Thomas, his philosophical works, 

641. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 468. 503; his Religio 
Medici, 468, 470; his Pseudodoxia Epi- 
demica, 468 ; his Hydrotaphia, Garden of 
Cyrus, 469. 

, William, 317; his Britannia's Pasto* 

rals, Shepherd's Pipe, 305. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 13, 642, 643, 
644, 647; her Aurora Leieh, 648. 

, Robert, 642, 643, 645, 646, 647 ; his Sor- 

dello, 648. 

Brunne, Robert of, 64, 65; his Handlynge 
Sinne, 65, 67 ; his translation of Langtoft's 
Chronicle, 65. 

Brunton, Mary, her novels, 634. 

Buchanan, George, 146, 337 ; his life, 191- 
194 ; his Latin satires and tragedies and 
translations, Paraphrasis Psalmorum Da- 
vidis poetica, 192 ; his Reruni Scoticarum, 
Historia, 193, 194. 

, Robert, 646, 647. 

Buckingham, Duke of, see Villiers, George. 

Buckle, Henry Thomas, 644. 

Bulwer, Lord Lytton, see Lytton, Lord. 

Bunyan, John, his life, 489, 490, 495,497; 
his Divine Emblems, 491 ; his Pilgrim's 
Progress, 491,492; his Holy City, Justifi- 
cation by Faith, 491 ; his Holy War, 492. 



INDEX. 



653 



Burgh, Benedict, his translation of Cato'fi 
Morals, Version of De Regimine Princi- 
pura, 121. 

Burke, Edmund, 116; his life, 597-601,626; 
his Vindication of Natural Society, Sub 
lime and Beautiful, the Annual Register, 
598; his pamphlets and speeches, 599, 
600; his Revolution in France, 600. 

Burnet, George, 625. 

, Gilbert, his Memoirs of the Dukes 

of Hamilton, 483; his History of the 
Reformation of the Church of England, 
v. 465, 466, 483; his Letters to Robert Boyle, 
Life of William Bedell, History of His 
Own Time, 484. 

, Thomas, his Telluris Theoria Sacra, 

Archa-ologia Philosophica, 555. 

Burney, Frances, Madame D'Arblay, her 
Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, 602. 

Burns. Robert. 13; his life, 610-613; his 
Holy Fair, Twa Herds, Holy Willie's 
Prayer, Halloween, Cotter's Saturday 
Night, 611; his To a Mountain Daisy, To 
a Mouse, 611; his Poems, Tarn o'Shanter, 
612. 613. 

Burton, John Hill, 645. 

, Robert, his Anatomy of Melancholy, 

339. 

Bury, Richard de, his life, 56-59; his Philo- 
biblon, 56, 58, 59. 

Butler, Joseph, his Analogy of Religion, 
560. 

, Samuel, his life, 405-408; his nudi- 

bras, 406-408. 

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 629, 632; his 
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
Hours of Idleness, Childc Harold, Giaour, 
Don Juan, and other works, 629. 

c. 

Caedmon, 18, 33; his life, 13-15,22; his Par- 
aphrase, 15-17, 19,21. 

Cainl, Edward, 647. 

Caldei wood, David, his True History of the 
Church of Scotland. 353. 

Camden, William, 272, 275, 285, 326; his 
Britannia, Greek Grammar. 347; his An 
nales Rerum Anglicarum etHibernicarum 
regnant* Elizabetha, 347, 348. 

Campbell, Thomas, his Pleasures of Hope, 
Lochiel's Warning, Exile of Erin, Ger- 
trude of Wyoming, 627; his later poems 
and prose w'orks, 628. 

Canterbury, Eadmer of, his Historia Novo- 
rum, 39. 

Canute, King, 21. 

Carew, Richard, his Godfrey of Bulloigne, 
197. 

, Thomas, 320, 322, 323. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 63S, 642, 643, 644, 645, 649; 
his Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, 
Frederick the Great and other works, 
638. 

Carter, Elizabeth, 614. 

Cartwright, William, 320; his lyrics and 
plays, 323. 

Cavendish, George, his Life of Wolsey, 223. 

Caxton, William, 115, 116, 122, 125, 128, 129, 
151, 152; his translation of Histories of 
Troy, of the Game and Play of the Chess, 



Cayley, C. B., 647. 

Celts, 7, 8, 9-12. 

Centlivre, Susanna, 531 ; her Bus}--Body 
and other plays, 532. 

Chalmers, Thomas, his Astronomical Dis- 
courses, 641. 

Chambers, Robert, 643, 644. 

, William, 646. 

Chapman, George, 189, 272, 276, 291, 297, 
317 ; his Shadow of Night, Ovid's Banquet 
of Sence, 318; his Homer's Iliad and 
Odyssey, 318, 319 ; his comedies and trage- 
dies, 318 , his Homeric Hymns, and Bat- 
tle of Frogs and Mice, 319. 

Chatterton, Thomas, his poems, 606, 607. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2, 13, 33, 56, 59, 65, 69, 
71, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 110, 113, 115, 
117, 118, 120, 122, 143, 159, 160, 161, 169, 
244, 277, 396, 407, 536; his life, 75-92; his 
Romaunt of the Rose, 77, 107 ; his Trans- 
lation of Boethius, 77 ; his Court of Love, 
76, 77, 78, 79,80, 107; Chaucer's stanza, 
78, 79, 80, 118, 119, 120, 122, 147, 153, 155, 
160, 165, 168, 177, 178, 231, 233, 234, 242, 
253, 254, 265, 278, 338; bis Assembly of 
Foules, 79, 80, 82; his Complaint cf the 
Black Knight, 80, 82, 244; Chaucer's 
Dream, 81, 82; his Book of the Duchess, 
82; his Troilus and Cressida, 84, 85, 102, 
122; his House of Fame, 85-87, 178; his 
Legend of Good Women, 87; bis Flower 
and Leaf, 88, 89; his Cuckoo and Night- 
ingale, 89; his Bread and Milk for Babes, 
90, 91; his Testament of Love, 91, 103; 
his Canterbury Tales, 76, 91-98, 102, 118, 
447, 536; his so-called spurious Avritings, 
98; his contemporaries, 100-110. 

Cheke, Sir John, his life, 190, 191, 210; his 
De Pronuntiatione Lingua* Grrecai, 
Remedy for Sedition, 190. 

Chesterfield, Earl of, his Letters to his Son, 
591. 

Chestre, Thomas, his version of the Lay of 
Sir Latin fal, 121. 

Chettle, Henry, 267, 268; his Kind Heart's 
Dream, 268. 

Cheynell, Francis, his Chillingworthi No- 
vissima, 375. 

Child, Sir Josiah, his New Discourse of 
Trade, 471. 

Chillingworth, William, his Religion of the 
Protestants, etc., 374, 375. 

Chrestien of Troyes, 43, 44. 

Chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon, 20, 26, 30. 

Chronicles, Latin and French, 35-40. 

Churchill, Charles, 607, 608; his Rosciad, 
Ghost, Prophecy of Famine, 607. 

Churchyard, Thomas, his Jane Shore, 234, 
235; his Wolsey and numerous poems, 
235, 236. 

Cibber, Colley, 533, 534, 541, 542, 543; his 
Love's Last Shift, Careless Husband, and 
other plays, 534; his Non-juror, 534, 541. 

Clarendon, Lord, .see Hyde.Edward. 

Clarke, Samuel, his writings on theology, 
mathematics, natural philosophy, 562. 

Cleveland, John, 320, 322. 

Cobbe, Frances Power, 646. 

Cobbett, William, his journalistic writings, 
636. 

Colenso, John William, 644. 

Coleridge, Hartley, his Poems, 631. 



654 



INDEX. 



Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 620, 621, 625, 626; 
his life, 623, 624; his Songs of the Pixies, 
Watchman, 623; his Ancient Mariner, 
Christabel, Remorse, Friend, translation 
of Wallenstein, and other works, 624. 

Colet, John, 133, 134, 136. 

Collier, Jeremy, 447, 448, 487, 512; his Im- 
morality and Profaneness of the Stage, 
Essays on Moral Subjects, 487 ; his Eccle- 
siastical History of Great Britain, trans- 
lation of Moreri"s Dictionary, 488. 

, John Payne, his writings concerning 

Shakespeare, 640. 

Collins, Wilkie, 642, 643, 644, 645. 

, William, his Persian Eclogues, Odes, 

553. 

Colman, Georee, 608. 

Congreve, William, 446, 450, 4S8, 512, 519; 
his Incognita, Old Bachelor, Double 
Dealer, 450; his Love for Love, Mourn- 
ing Bride, and other works, 451. 

Constable, Henry, his Diana, Spiritual Son- 
nets, 249. 

Corbet, Richard, 320; his Poetica Stromata, 
322. 

Coryat, Thomas, his Crudities, Crambe, 
313. 

Cotton, Charles, his translations from Cor- 
neille and Montaigne, 472; his Second 
Part of the Complete Angler, 473. 

, Robert Bruce, 338, 339, 342, 348. 

Coverdale, Miles, his Bible, 144, 145. 

Cowley, Abraham, 324, 325, 405, 408, 422, 
430, 467; his life, 402-404; his love-poems, 
plays and other works, 402, 403; his 
Plantarum, Libri vi., translations, 403, 
404; his Essays in Verse and Prose, 404, 
405. 

, Hannah, her Maid of Arragon, and 

comedies, 614. 

Cowper, William, 116, 328; his life, 608- 
610; the Olney Hymns, 609; his Progress 
of Error, Truth, Table-Talk, 609; his 
Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversa- 
tion, Task, translation of Homer, 610. 

Crabbe, George, his Library, 626; his Vil- 
lage, Newspaper, Parish Register, Tales 
of the Hall, 627. 

Craik, George Lillie, 640, 643; his Pursuit 
of Knowledge under Difficulties and 
other works, 640. 

Cranmer, Archbishop, his Bible, 145, 146. 

Crashaw, Richard, his Steps to the Temple, 
Delights of the Muses, 316, 317. 

Creech, Thomas, 444; his translations from 
Lucretius and Horace, 454. 

Croft, Dr., his Naked Truth, 412. 

Cromwell, Thomas, his Bible, 145. 

Crowne, John, his Juliana, City Politics, 
Calisto, Destruction of Jerusalem, and 
other works, 425, 426. 

Cudworth, Ralph, 369, 475; his True Intel- 
lectual System of the Universe, 473. 

Cumberland, Richard, 608. 

Cynewulf, 19; his Elene, 19, 20; his Juli- 
ana, Christ, 19. 



I). 



Danes, 8. 

Daniel, Samuel, 189, 272, 276; his transla- 



tion of Paulus Jovius, Delia, 302; his First 
Fowre Books of the Civille Warres, 302; 
his other works, 303, 304. 

D'Arblav, Madame, see Burney, Frances. 

Darwin, Charles, 644, 646. 

, Erasmus, his Botanical Garden, 613. 

Daveuant, Sir William, 301, 391, 419, 420, 
4:54, 435; his life, 413-418; his masques 
and plavs, 413; his Gondibert, 413-416, 
431; his* Siege of Rhodes, 416-418. 

Davies, Sir John, 272, 320; his Orchestra, 
250, 251; his Nosce Teipsum, 250, 251, 
414. 

Davison, Francis, his Poetical Rhapsody, 
228. 

Daw, Sir Humphry, 641. 

Defoe, Daniel, 563, 632; his life, 563-570; 
his Robinson Crusoe, 517, 568, 569; his 
Review, 524, 567; his Tracts, 564, 567, 
568; his Essay on Projects, 564; his True- 
horn Englishman, 564, 565; his Shortest 
Way with the Dissenters, 565, 566; his 
Hymn to the Pillory, 566; his Jure Divi- 
no, History of the Union between Eng- 
land and Scotland, 567 his Captain Single- 
ton, and other novels, 569, 570. 

Dekker, Thomas, 272, 276, 287, 288, 291; 
his Satiromastix, 287, 291 ; his plays, 297. 

Denham, Sir John, 320, 519; his Essay on 
Gaming, Sophy, Cooper's Hill, Cato Ma- 
jor, 323; his translation of Virgil's .^Eneid, 
323. 

Dennis, John, 511-513, 537, 538; his Passion 
of Byblis, Impartial Critic, Miscellaneous 
Poems, plays and other works, 511, 512, 
513. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 629; his Confessions 
of an Opium-Eater and other works, 637. 

De Vere, Aubrey, 647. 

Dibdin. Charles," 614. 

, Thomas, 614. 

, Thomas Frognall, his Bibliomania and 

other works, 645. 

Dickens, Charles, 635, 642, 643, 644, 645, 646, 
649 ; his Pickwick Papers and other nov- 
els, 635. 
j Digby, Sir Kenelm, his Treatises on the 
Nature of Bodies and of Man's Soul, Ob- 
servations on Browne's Religio Medici, 
469, 470. 

Dilke, Sir C. W., 647. 

Dillon, Wentworth, Earl of Roscommon, 
421, 444, 519; his translations from Hor- 
ace, Virgil, and Guarini, Essay on Trans- 
lated Verse, 421. 

Diodati, Charles, 326, 334, 335. 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 635, 643; his Vivian 
Grey and other novels, 635. 

, Isaac, his Curiosities of Literature and 

other works, 640. 

Dixon, W. Hepworth, 643, 645, 646. 

Dobell, Sydney, 642, 643. 

Dobson, Austin, 647. 

Donne, John, his life, 310-312; his Pseudo- 
Martyr, Elegy on the Death of Prince 
Henry, Devotions upon Emergent Occa- 
sions, 311 ; his Anatomy of the World, 312. 

Doran, John, 643, 645. 

Dorset, Earl of, see Sackville, Charles. 

Douglas, Gavin, 151, 177; his life, 162, 163; 
his version of the ^Eneid, 163, 164; his 
Palace of Honor, King Hart, 163. 

Dowdeu, Edward, 647, 648. 



INDEX. 



655 



Drake, Nathan, his Shakespeare and his 
Times, 639. 

Drama, germs of, 45, 46, 179-181 ; vise of, 
in comedy, 181; rise of, in tragedy, 251- 
254; Actors and Theatres, 255-258. 

Drayton, Michael, 272, 276; his Harmony 
of the Church, Matilda, and other works, 
303, 3u4; his Polyolbion, 304, 305. 

Drummoml, William, his Poems, Flowe'-s 
of Sion, 309. 

Dr\-den, John, 13, 296, 301, 393, 408, 414, 
418, 419, 420, 423, 425, 435, 436, 452, 453, 
454, 488, 508, 509, 512, 519, 536, 537, 553; 
his life, 430-448; his Astraea Redux, 431; 
his Wild Gallant, 426, 431 ; his Rival La- 
dies. 431, 432; his Indian Emperor, 4&3; 
his Annus Mirabilis, 404, 434 ; his Essay of 
Dramatic Poesy, 419, 434 ; his Secret Love, 
Sir Martin Mar-all, Tyrannic Love, and 
other plays, 435 ; his Conquest of Granada, 
420, 43.j; his Amboyna, Assignation, 
Aurcng-Zebe, 436; his All for Love, ffidi- 
pus, Troilus and Cressida, 437, 453; his 
Epistles of Ovid, Spanish Friar, 438; his 
Absalom and Achitophel, 423, 438, 439,441, 
444,445; his Medal. 440; his MacFleckncx-, 
441; his Religio Laici, 441-143; his Mis- 
cellany Poem.-, 443; his Sylv<e, 444; his 
Hind 'and Panther, 443, 444, 445, 507, 
509; his Don Sebastian, Amphitryon, 
Cleomenes and other plays, 445, 446; his 
Examen Porticum, Annual Miscellany, 
446, 447 ; his Translation of Virgil, 447, 
531; his Fables, 447, 536. 

Du Bartas, 197, 321, 338. 

Duck, Stephen, his Thresher's Labour, 
SLiunamite, 551, 552. 

Duke, Richard, 444; hie translations of 
Ovid and Juvenal, 454. 

Dunbar, William, 116, 151, 162, 169; his 
life, 158; his Lament for the Makers, 122, 
162; his Golden Terge, 159, 160, 163; his 
Thistle and Rose, 160, 161; his Dance of 
the Seven Deadly Sins, 161. 

Dunstan, 28, 29; his Commentary on the 
Benedictine Rule, 28. 

D'Urfey, Thomas, his comedies and trage- 
dies, "Butler's Ghost, Wit and Mirth: or, 
Pills to Purge Melancholy, 422, 423. 

Dyce, Alexander, 283, 642, 643. 

Dyer, John, his Grongar Hill, Ruins of 
Rome, Fleece, 549. 



E. 

Eadmer of Canterbury, 39. 

Earle, John, his Micro-cosmographie, 317. 

Earliest Europeans, 7. 

Early Modern English, 3, 4. 

Edgeworth, Maria, her Castle Rackrent, and 
other novels, 633. 

Edwards, Amelia B., 647. 

, M. Betham, 647. 

, Richard, his Paradise of Dainty De- 
vices, 228, 253, 255; his Damon and 
Pithias, Palamon and Arcyte, 255. 

Eliot, George, 644, 645, 646, 647, 649. 

Elliott, Ebenezer, 631. 

Ellwood, Thomas, History of his Life, 392. 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, his Governor, Castle of 
Health, Latin and English Dictionary, 



Defence or Apology of Good Women, 
149, 150. 

Erceldoune, Thomas of, his version of Sir 
Tristram, 63. 

Erigena, John Scotus, 24. 

Eschenbach, Wolfram von, his Parzival, 44. 

Ethelwol.l, 28, 29; his translation of Bene- 
dict's Rule of a Monastic Life, 28. 

Etherege, Sir George, 412; his comedies, 
423, 436. 

Euphuism, earlier, 212, 214, 223, 244, 259, 
263, 264, 280. 286; later, 309, 310, 316, 354, 
404, 416, 430, 438. 

Evelyn, John, 373, 415, 451, 472; his Apolo- 
gy for the Royal Party, 463; his Diary, 
485; his French Gardener, Fumifugium, 
Mundus Muliebris, and numerous other 
works, 485. 

Exeter Book, the, 19, 20. 



F. 



Fabyan, Robert, his Concordance of His- 
tories, 147, 148, 235. 

Fairfax, Edward, his Godfrey of Bulloigne, 
197. 

Falconer, William, his Shipwreck, 607. 

Faraday. Michael. 641, 043. 

Farquhar, George, 450 ; his Love and a 
Bottle, 451 ; his Inconstant, Twin Rivals, 
Recruiting Officer and Beaux Stratagem, 
452. 

Farrar, F. W., 648. 

Fawcett, Henry, 648. 

. Mrs. M. f.., 646. 

Feltham, Owen, his Resolves, 368. 

Fenton, Elijah, 540, 541; his Mariamne, 
translations of Homer, Life of Milton, 
541. 

Ferguson, Robert, his Farmer's Ingle, 611. 

Fergusson, James, 9.- 

Ferrers, George, A Mirror for Magistrates, 
233, 234. 

Field, Nathaniel, his plays, 298. 

Fielding, Henry, §63, 617, 632; his life, 
573-580; his Joseph Andrews, 574, 575, 
his Love in Several Masques, Temple 
Beau, and other plays, 574, 575; the 
Champion, 575; his Miscellanies, Jona- 
than Wild, 576; the True Patriot, 576; 
his Tom Jones, 577-579, 590; his Amelia, 
579, 580 ; the Covent Garden Journal, 580. 

, Sarah, her David Simple, History of 

Ophelia, 576. 

Fifteenth Century, Intellectual Character of, 
113-115. 

Filmer, Sir Robert, his Anarchy of a Mixed 
and Limited Monarchy, 376; his Patri- 
archa, 376, 477; his Freeholder's Grand 
Inquest, Observations upon Mr. Hobbes's 
Leviathan, etc., 376. 

First English, 3, 5-30. 

First English Poems, mechanism of, 21. 

Fisher, John, 133, 134. 

Fletcher, Giles, his Christ's Victory and 
Triumph, 305, 306. 

, John, 189, 276, 288, 294, 422, 448, 551; 

his Woman Hater, and Thierry and The- 
odoret, 294; his joint plays with Beau- 
mont, 295-297, 401; his Faithful Shep- 
herdess, 296. 



656 



INDEX. 



Fletcher, Phineas, his Locustes, Sicelides, 
Sjiva Poetica, Purple Island, 306. 

Florence of Worcester, 39. 

Florio, John, his First Fruites, Second 
Frvtes, translation of Montaigne's Essays, 
196. 

Foote, Samuel, his comedies, 608. 

Ford, John, 276; his plays, 297. 

Forster, John, 643, 644. 645, 646, 647. 

Forteseue, Sir John, llo, 125, 127; his De 
Laudibus Legum Anglise, 125; his Differ- 
ence between Absolute and Limited 
Monarchy, 127. 

Foster, John, his Essays, 63S. 

Fox, George, his life, 495-498; his Journal 
of his Life, Travels, etc., 498. 

, John, his Latin Plays, 191, 202; his 

life, 202; his Book of Martyrs, 201. 

Francis, Sir Philip, 599. 

Freeman, Edward A., 643, 645, 646, 647. 

Frisians, 8, 12. 

Froude, J. A., 644, 645, 646, 647. 

Fuller, Thomas, 353, 495; his David's 
Hainous Sinne, etc., History of the Holy 
Warre, 353; his H0I3' and Profane States, 
Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, Abel Redivivus, 
Church History of Britain, History of the 
Worthies of England, 354. 

G. 

Gaimar, Geoffrey, his translation of Geof- 
frey of Monmouth's Chronicle, 26, 39. 

Gait, John, 634. 

Gardiner, S. R., 647. 

Garrick, David, 588, 589, 590, 598, 607. 

Garth, Samuel, his Dispensary, 454. 

Gascoigne, George, 324; his pla3's and mi- 
nor poems, 236, 237; his Steel Glass, 237. 

Gaskell. Elizabeth C, 642, 643, 644, 645. 

Gast, Luces de, his Tristan, 43. 

Gauden, John, his life, 376-378; his Reli- 
gious and Loyal Protestation, etc., 376; 
his Eikon Basilike, 376, 377, 384. 

Gay, John, 530, 532, 542, 547 ; his life, 534, 
535; his Rural Sports, Shepherd's Week, 
Beggar's Opera, Poems, Fables, 535. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 36, 37, 38. 

Gerald of Wales, or du Barri, 39. 

Gibbon, Edward, his Decline and Fall of 
the Roman Empire, 596; his Etude de la 
Litterature, Memoirs, 597. 

Gifford. William, his Baviad, Maeviad, Epis- 
tle to Peter Pindar, and other works, 636. 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, his Discourse to 
prove a Passage by the North-West, 224, 
225. 

Gildon, Charles, his Complete Art of Poe- 
try, Life of Defoe, Laws of Poetry, 513. 

Giraldus Cambrensis, 39. 

Gladstone, W. E., 643, 644, 647, 648. 

Glanville, Ralph, 50; his Tractates de Le- 
gibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglise, 
50, 51. 

Gloucester Fragments, 28. 

, Robert of, 64; his Chronicle of Eng- 
land, Lives and Legends of the English 
Saints, 64. 

Glover, Richard, his Leonidas, London, 
Boadicea, and other works, 551. 

Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, her Vindica- 
tion of the Rights of Woman, 601. 



Godwin, William, 629; his Caleb Williams 
and other novels, 633. 

Golding, Arthur, his translations of Jus- 
tin's History, Ctesar's Commentaries, 
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Mornay on the 
Truth of Christianity, 194, 195. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 597, 598, 608; his life, 
605, 606; his Citizen of the World, 585; 
the Monthly Review, Critical Review, 
Polite Learning in Europe, the Bee, Pub- 
lic Ledger, 605; bis Vicar of Wakefield, 
605, 606; his Traveller, Good-natured 
Man, Deserted Village, She Stoops to 
Conquer, 606; his Histories of Greece, 
Rome, England, Animated Nature, 606. 

Googe, Barnaby, his translations of Man- 
zolli's Zodiac of Life, Kirchmeyer's Popish 
Kingdom, Heresbach's Four Books of 
Husbandry, 196; his Eglogs, Epytaphes, 
and Sonettes, 196. 

Gosson, Stephen, his life, 203, 204; his plays, 
203; his School of Abuse, 203; his Apolo- 
gy for the School of Abuse, Plays Con- 
futed in Five Actions, etc., 204. 

Gower, John. 85, 107, 120, 160, 169, 321 ; his 
life, 99-104; his Balades, 99, 100; his 
Speculum Meditantis, 100; his Vox Cla- 
mantis, 100, 101, 102, 103, 119; hisConfes- 
sio Amantis, 95, 102, 103; his Tripartite 
Chronicle, 103. 

Graal, the Holy, 42-44. 

Grafton, Richard, his Abridgement, Man- 
ual of the Chronicles of England, Chron- 
icle at large, etc., 148, 223. 

Grahamme, James, his Sabbath, 614. 

Grainger, James, his Sugar Cane, 697. 

Granville, George, his She-Gallants, Heroic 
Love, 455. 

Gray, David, 644. 

, Thomas, his life, 603-605; his odes, 

On the Spring, On a Distant Prospect of 
Eton College, 604; his Elegy Written in 
a Country Churchyard, 604; his odes on 
The Progress of Poetry, and The Bard, 
605. 

Green, John Richard, 646, 647. 

, Matthew, his Grotto, Spleen, and oth- 
er poems, 546. 

Greene, Robert, 239, 269; his life, 264, 265, 
275; his love-pamphlets and plays, 264- 
267, 268. 

Gregory, Pope, the Great, his Regula Pas- 
toralis, 27. 

Greville, Fulke, 216, 247, 413; his Certaine 
Learned and Elegant Workes, Alaham, 
Mustapha, 247, 248. 

Grimald, Nicholas, his Death of Zoroas and 
Death of Cicero, in blank verse, 235. 

Grocyn, William, 133, 134, 135, 136. 

Grosart, A. B., 647. 

Grose, his Antiquities of Scotland, 613. 

Grosseteste, Robert, his life, 54-56; his nu- 
merous works, Chateau d'Araour, 55, 56. 

Grote, George, 639, 645, 646; his History of 
Greece, 639. 

Guildford, Nicholas of, his Owl and Night- 
ingale, 63, 89. 

H. 

Habington, William, his Castara, Holy Man, 
Queen of Aragon, History of Edward 
IV., 317. 



IXDEX. 



657 



Ilakhiyt, Richard, his Divers "Voyages, etc., 
Principal Navigations, etc., 225, 22G, 34S. 

Hales, John, bis Golden Remains, 845, 346. 

Hall, Arthur, his translation of Homer's 
Iliad, 196. 

, Edward, his Chronicle, 148, 223, 224, 

235. 

, Joseph, 272, 276, 320; his Virgidemia- 

rum, 320, 321. 

, Robert, his sermons, 641. 

Hal lam, Arthur Henry, 631. 

, Henry, 113; his Middle Ages, Consti- 
tutional History of England, Literature of 
Europe, 638. 

Halliwell, J. O., 643. 

Hamilton, Sir William, 641, 644; his Logic, 
Metaphysics and other Works, 641. 

Hanmer, Sir Thomas, his Shakespeare, 561, 
590. 

Harding, John, his Chronicle, 121. 

Hardy, Thomas, 646, 647, 

Hare, Augustus J. C, 646, 647. 

.Augustus William and Julius Charles, 

their Guesses at Truth, 641. 

Harington, Sir John, 320; his Orlando Fu- 
rioso in English Heroical Verse, 197, 322; 
his Metamorphosis of Ajax, Nugai Anti- 
que, and other works, 322. 

Hariot, Thomas, his Briefe and True Re- 
porte of the New Found Land of Virgin- 
ia, 225. 

Harrington, James, his life, 459-402 ; his 
Commonwealth of Oceana, 400, 401; his 
Art of Lawgiving, 402. 

Harry, Blind, his Wallace, 122. 

Hartley, David, his Observations on Man, 
556. 

Hartlib, Samuel, 366, 383, 463; his Ecclesi- 
astical Peace among Protestants, Descrip- 
tion of Macaria, Reformation of Schooles, 
Flemish Agriculture, 366. 

Harvey, Gabriel, 216, 221, 320; his life, 238, 
239, 240, 275; his Smithus, 191; his Grat- 
ulationee Waldenses, 191, 216, 238; his 
Ciceronianus, Rhetor, 238. 

, William, 365, 366. 

Haweis, R. K., 648. 

Hawes, Stephen, his Temple of Glass, Pas- 
time of Pleasure, Conversion of Swearers, 
Joyful Meditation of all England, 178. 

Hayward, John, his Lives of Henry TV., 
William I., William II., Henry 1., and 
Edward VI., 346, 347. 

Hazlitt, William, his critical and other 
works, 637. 

Heber, Reginald, his Poems, Hymns, and 
other works, 630. 

Helps, Arthur, 643, 644, 647. 

Hemans, Felicia, her poems, 630. 

Henry of Bracton, 51. 

, of Huntingdon, 39. 

VIII., King, his writings against Lu- 
ther, 140, 141. 

Henryson, Robert, his Moral Fables of 
^Esop the Phrygian, Testament of Cres- 
seid, RobeneaudMakyne, BludySerk, 122. 

Herbert, Edward, 343, 456, 472; his De 
Veritate, History of the Life and Reign 
of Henry VIII., 352, 353. 

, Geonje, his life, 315,316; his Temple, 

Priest to the Temple, 316. 



Herrick, Robert, 320; his Hesperides, No- 
ble Is umbers, 325. 

Herschel, Sir William, 641. 

Heylin, Peter, his Microcosmus, 374. 

Hey wood, Jasper, 230; his version of Sene- 
ca's Troas, Thyestes, and Hercules Fu- 
rens, 253, 254. 

.John, 253; his Interludes, 184, 185; his 

Epigrams, 184. 

, Thomas, 272, 276; his plays, 297. 

Higden, Ralph, 39, 40; his Polychronicon, 
39, 40, 67, 109, 115; his miracle-plays, 67, 
70. 

Higgins, John, A Mirror for Magistrates, 
234. 

Hilarius, 44,45; his St. Nicholas, Raising 
of Lazarus, History of Daniel, 45, 46. 

Hoadly, Benjamin, his sermons and theo- 
logical writings, 562. 

Hobbes, Thomas, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 
462; his life, 456-459; his Translation of 
Thucydides, 456; his De Mirabilibus Pec- 
ci, Elementa Philosophica de Cive, Hu- 
man Nature, De Corpore Politico, 457 ; his 
Leviathan, 376, 457, 458, 481 ; his Of Liber- 
ty and Necessity, 458, 459; his Transla- 
tion of the Iliad and Odyssey, Life, Behe- 
moth, 459; his controversy with Wallis, 
463. 

Holland, Barbara, her novels, 634. 

Hogg, James, his Mountain Bard and other 
poems, 630. 

Ilolinshed, Ralph, his Chronicle, 224, 235; 
his Description of Britaine, 224. 

Holyday, Dr. Barten, his Technogamia, 
translations of Juvenal and Persius, 319. 

Home, John, his Douglas, 608. 

Hood, Thomas, his Whims and Oddities, 
and other works, 638. 

Hook, Theodore, 634. 

1 Iooke, Robert, 464 ; his Micrographia, 466. 

Hooker, Richard, 189, 472; his life, 189, 
205-207, 275; his Laws of Ecclesiastical 
Polity, 206, 207. 

Hope, Thomas, his Anastasius, 634. 

Hopkins, John, his Psalms, 228, 229. 

lloveden, Roger of, his Annales, 39. 

Howard, Hon. Edward, his British Princes, 
432. 

, Sir Robert, 420, 431, 433, 434; his In- 
dian Queen, 432, 433; his Songs and Son- 
nets, and other works, 432 : his Duke of 
Lerma, 434. 

Howe, John, his life, 494, 495; his Living 
Temple, 495. 

Hudson, Thomas, his translation of Du 
Bartas, 197. 

Hughes, John, his Triumphs of Peace, 
odes, translations, and plays, 532. 

, Thomas, 644. 

Hume, David, 594-596, 607; his life, 594- 
596; his Human Nature, 594, 595; his Es- 
says, 594; his Political Discourses, Prin- 
ciples of Morals, 595 ; his Natural History 
of Religion, History of England, 595. 

Hunt, Leigh, 629, 636, 642, 643. 

Huntingdon, Henry of, his Chronicon, 39. 

Hunton, Philip, his Treatise on Monarchy, 
375. 

Hurd, Richard, his Dialogues, Letters on 
Chivalry and Romance, 587. 

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 643, 645, 646, 647. 



65S 



INDEX. 



Hyde. Edward, Lord Clarendon, his Errors 
in Hobbes's Leviathan, History of the 
Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 
Collection of Tracts, Account of his Life, 
481. 



I. 



Inchbald, Elizabeth, her plays and novels, 

614. 
Ingelow, Jean, 544, 645. 
Ingleby.C. M.,647. 
Interludes, 184, 1S5. 



J. 



James, G. P. R., 634. 

James I., King of England, his Essayes of a 
Premise in the Divine Art of Poesie, His 
Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant 
Houres, Counterblaste to Tobacco, and 
other prose writings, 337. 338. 

James I., King of Scotland, 115, 116; his 
life, 119-121 ; his King's Quair, 120, 121. 

Jameson, Anna, 643. 

Jebb, Professor. 647. 

Jeffrey, Lord, Edinburgh Review, 637. 

Jerrold, Douglas, 63S, 642, 643; his plays 
and novels, 638. 

Jevons, W. S., 646. 

Jewel. Bishop John, 191.205; his Apologia 
Eeclesia? Anglicanse, 191, 354. 

John of Bromyard, 125. 

Oxnead, 39. 

Trokelowe, 39. 

Johnson. Samuel. 554; his life, 587-594, z "n 
605; his Shakespeare, 561, 590, 593; his 
translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abys- 
sinia, 5SS; the Gentleman's Magazine, 
588, 5S9, 500; his Irene, 5SS. 5S9, 590; his 
London ; 5S9, 590; his Life of Savage, 
589; his Dictionary, 590, 591, 592; his 
Vanity of Human Wishes. Rambler, Ad- 
venturer, 590; his World, Idler, Rasselas, 
591; his political pamphlets;, 593; his 
Lives of the English Poets, 590,594; his 
Museum of Scottish Song, 612. 

Jones, Inigu, 1S3. 293, 401. 

Jonson, Ben, 183, 1S9, 272, 276, 295, 296, 
298, 299, 301, 309, 323, 327, 404,413,417, 
453,488, 515, 636; his life, 2S5-294; his 
Every Man in his Humour, 2S5, 286: his 
Every Man out of his Humour, Cynthia's 
Revels. 236. 317; his Poetaster, 2>6. 2>7. 
298; his Sejanus, 290, 291,292; his Vol- 
pone, 292, 294 ; his Epiciene. Alchemist, 
Catiline, 292, 401 ; his Bartholomew Fair, 
292, 293; his Devil is an Ass, 292, 293; his 
Forest, Staple of News, New Inn. Mag- 
netic Lady, 293; his Tale of a Tub, 293, 
515; his Sad Shepherd, 294. 

Jowett, Benjamin, 646. 

Junius, his Letters, 599. 



Kaye, John William. 645. 
Keats, John, 13, 829; his Hyperion, Lamia, 
Eve of St. Agnes, and other poems, 630. 



Keble, John, 631, 641, 645, 647: his Chris- 
tian Year, and other poems, 631. 

Ken, Thomas, his Hymns, Manual of 
Prayers, Serapkical Meditations, 501. 502. 

Killigrew. Thomas, his Plays, 418, 419. 

King, William, his Journey to London, 
-actioner. 454. 455. 

KJngJake, A. W., 645. 

Kingsley. Charles. 643. 644, 645, 646. 

Knight, Charles, 643, 644. 

Knighton, Henry, 125. 

Knolles, Richard, his General Historv of 
Ihe Turks, 352. 

Knowles, James Sheridan, his Flays, 634. 

Knox. John. 146, 16S; his life. 199^202: his 
First Blast of the Trumpet against the 
Monstrous Regiment of Woman. Second 
Blast, 200; his~ Historie of the Reforma- 
tion of Religioun within the Realme of 
Scotland. 201. 

Kyd, Thomas, 289; his Spanish Tragedv, 
209, 285; his First Part of Jeronimo, ver- 
sion of Gamiers Chronicle, 269. 



Lamb. Charles, his Essays of Elia, and 

other works, 636. 
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, her Troubadour 

and other poems, 631. 
Landor, Walter Savage, his Gebir, Count 

Julian, Imaginary Conversations, and 

other works. 828. 
Langbaine, Gerard, his Account of the 

English Dramatic Poets, 488. 
Langiand, William. 99, 104. 108; his Vision 

of Piers Ploughman. 104-106, 105; his 

Deposition of Richard n.. 104. 
Langtoft, Peter, his Chronicle of England, 

Latimer, Hugh, his Sermons, 141. 142. 

Layamon, 60-62; his Brut, 61; his vers-^ 
and English, 61. 

Layard. A. H., 643. 

Lecky. W. E. H.. 648. 

Lee, Nathaniel, 437, 443; his Xero. Rival 
Queens, Theodosius, and other 
426. 

. Sophia and Harriet, their Canterbury 

Tiles, 602. 

Leighton, Robert, his Zion's Plea against 
the Prelacy, Looking-Glass of the Holy 
War, 500. 

Leland, John, his life. 148, 149: his Itinera- 
ry, 148, 149; his Commentarii de Scrip- 
toribus Britannicis, Collectanea de Rebus 
Britannicis, 149: his Ksenise, 173. 

L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 486; the Public In- 
telligencer, 4S6; the Oxford Gazette. 
London Gazette, City Mercury. Observa- 
tor, Mercurius Librarius, 4S7: his Sene- 
ca's Morals, Tullv's Offices, Brief History 
of the Times. 487 : his Fables, 565. 

Lewes, George Henry, 643, 644, 645, 646, 
647. 

L wis, Matthew Gregory, his Monk, dra- 
mas and poems. 633. 

Lightfoot, John, his Erubhim, 346. 

Lilio, George, his George Barn well. 550. 

Lily, William, his Latin Grammar, 134. 

Linacre, Thomas, 133, 134, I 



INDEX. 



659 



Lindsay, Sir David, 151, 185; his life, 164, 
168; Lis Dream, 165, 166; his Complaint, 
166-16S; his Testament of the Papingo, 
16S; his Satire of the Three Estates, 168, 
180, 181; his Complaint and Public Con- 
fession of the King's Old Hound Bag- 
sche, Deploration of Queen Magdalene, 
Jousting of James Watson and John 
Barbour, Ane Supplicatioun against Side 
Taillis, Kittie's Confession, History of 
Squire "William Meldrum, Monarchie, 
169. 

Lindwood, William, his Constitutiones Pro- 
vinciates Ecclesiae Anglican*, 125. 

Lingard, John, his History of England, 
638. 

Lisle, William, his translation of Du Bar- 
tas, 197. 

Lister, Thomas Henry, 634. 

Livingstone, David, 646. 

Locke, John, 511; his life, 473-475; his 
Essay concerning Human Understanding, 
474, 475, 478, 479 ; his New Method of a 
Commonplace Book, Consequences of the 
Lowering of Interest, etc., 475; his Let- 
ters concerning Toleration, 476, 477; his 
Treatises of Government, 477, 478; his 
Thoughts concerning Education, 479, 480; 
his Reasonableness of Christianity, Con- 
duet of the Understanding, and other 
works. 4s •. 

Lockhart, John Gibson, his Life of Sir 
Walter Scott, 639. 

Lockyer. J. Norman, 648. 

Lodge, Thomas, 258, 267, 275; his Wounds 
of Civil War, etc., 259; his Looking- 
Glass for London and England, 259, 266, 
267, 28S. 

Long, George, 646. 

Lovelace, Richard, 320, 325; his Soldier, 
To Althea, Lucasta, 324. 

Lovell. Robert, 625. 

Lydgate, John, 13, 115, 116, 120, 160; his 
life, 117; his Fails of Princes, 118, 232; 
his Story of Thebes, Troy Book, 118; his 
De Regiminc Principum, 121. 

Lyly, John, 189. 248, 264, 289, 590; his life, 
208, 213-216, 275; his Euphues, 213,214, 
259; his Euphues and his England, 214, 
215; his Woman in the Moon, Maids 
Metamorphosis, Campaspe and other 
plays, 263, 264. 

Lyttelton, George, Lord, 563, 576; his Let- 
ters from a Persian, Dialogues of the 
Dead, History of the Life of King Henry 
II., etc., 563. 

Lytton, Lord, 635, 642, 643, 644, 645, 646; his 
"novels, 630. 



M. 

Macaulay, Lord, 630, 643, 644; his essay on 

Milton, 63S; his History of England, 639. 
MacCarthy, Justin, 647. 
Maedonald, George, 643, 645, 647. 
Mackenzie, Sir George, 485; his Aretina, 

Moral Gallantry, 499. 
, Henry, his Man of Feeling and other 

novels, 602. 
Mackintosh, Sir James, his Vindicise Galli- 

ca?, 600; his philosophical works, 641. 



Macpherson, James, Ossian, 607. 

Mahaffy, J. P., 646, 647. 

Mair, John, 191, 199; his History of Great 
Britain, 146. 

Mallet, David, 548, 550: his tragedies, Life 
of Bacon, 550; his William and Margaret, 
550, 551 : his edition of Bolingbroke, 559. 

Mallock, W. H., 647, 643. 

Malmesbury, William of, 36, 37; his De 
Gestis Itegum, Historia Novella, De Ges- 
tis Pontificum, 37. 

Malone, Edmund, his editions of Shake- 
speare and Dry den, 602. 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 125, 129; his Byrth, 
Lif, and Actes of Kyng Arthur, 129. 

Malthus, Thomas Robert, his works on po- 
litical economy, 641. 

Mandeville, Bernard de, his life, 556. 558; 
his Hypochondriac and Hysteric Diseases, 
Grumbling Hive, 557; his Nature of So- 
ciety, Origin of Honor, 558. 

, Sir John, 99, 107,108. 

Map, Walter, 40-43, 54; his life, 40, 41; his 
Bishop Golias, 41, 123; his De Nugis Cu- 
rialium, 41, 42; his series of Arthurian 
romances, 42, 43. 44. 

Marlowe, Christopher, 189, 267, 269, 275, 
289, 320 ; his Tamburlaine the Great. 269- 
271 ; his Tragical Histoiy of Doctor 
Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward the Sec- 
ond, Massacre at Paris, 271; his Dido, 
Queen of Carthage, 209, 271. 272. 

Marryat, Captain Frederick, his naval sto- 
ries, 634. 

Marsh, George P., 115, 143. 

Marston, John. 272, 276, 287, 291, 320; his 
Malcontent, 291; his satires and plays, 
297. 

Martin. Theodore, 644, 645, 646. 

Marti neau, Harriet, 642, 646. 

, James, 647. 

Marvel 1, Andrew, 419, 487; his life, 408-413; 
his first poems, 409; his satires, 410-412; 
his Historical Essay concerning Councils, 
etc., Divine Prescience, Growth of Po- 
pery, etc., 413. 

Masques, 183, 184. 

Massey, Gerald, 643, 645. 

Massinger, Philip, 1S9, 276, 299; his plays, 
298, 6~36. 

Masson, David, 643, 644, 646, 648. 

Maudsley, Henry, 645. 

Maurice, Frederick Denison, 641, 642, 643, 
644, 645. 

May, Thomas, his plays, translations, his- 
torical poems, 299, 300. 

, Sir Thomas Erskine, 647. 

Mayne, Jasper, his comedies, 300. 

Meredith, George, 643. 

Mens, Francis, his Palladis Tamia, 223, 280, 
283. 

Merivale, Charles, 642. 

Michel, Dan. Avenbite of Inwit, 67. 

Middleton, Thomas, 189, 272, 276; his writ- 
ings, 297. 

Mill, James, his History of British India, 638. 

, John Stuart, 644, 645, 646. 

Miller, Hugh, 641. 

Milman, Henry Hart. 638, 643; his History 
of the Jews, of Christianity, of Latin 
Christianity, 638. 

Milton, John, 13. 16, 96, 317, 324, 345, 346, 
361, 366, 370, 371, 376, 378, 401, 409, 414, 



660 



INDEX. 



417, 437, 462, 404, 512, 519, 525, 528, 529, 
545, 605, 638; his life, 326-336, 380, 383, 
387, 390, 391, 392 ; his odes on the Nativity, 
the Circumcision and the Passion, 327; 
his sonnet of self-dedication, 327; his Ad 
Patrem, 328; his L'Allegro and II Pen- 
seroso, 328-330; his Arcades, 328, 330; 
his Comus, 325,328, 330,331 ; his Lycidas, 
329, 331-333; his Epitaphium Damonis, 
334, 335; his Apology for Smectymnuus, 
335; his pamphlets on Episcopacy, 378- 
380; on Divorce, 381, 382; his Areopagi- 
tica, 382, 383, 548; his History of Britain, 
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 383; 
his Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, 
384; his Eikonoklastes, 384, 391; his De- 
fence for the People of England, 387-389, 
391; his Second Defence, 334, 389, 390, 
409; his various other pamphlets, 390, 
398; his Paradise Lost, 237, 329, 336, 392- 
396, 401, 432, 436, 492, 52b, 550; his Para- 
dise Regained, 329, 392, 395; his Samson 
Agonistes, 325, 329, 397, 398. 

Minot, Laurence, his songs, 65. 

Miracle-Plays, 44-46, 179, 181; in English, 
67-71 ; the Chester Plays, the Shepherds' 
Play, 70, 71. 

Mitford, William, his History of Greece, 
638. 

Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 36, 37, 38,40; his 
Chronicon sive Historia Britonum, 37, 38, 
39, 40, 61, 251; his translation of the 
Prophecies of Merlin, 37, 38. 

Montague, Charles, 453, 508, 509, 519, 520, 
521 ; his poem on the Death of Charles II., 
508 ; his Country Mouse and City Mouse, 
507, 508, 509. 

, Lady Mary, her letters, 587. 

Montgomery, James, Jais Wanderer of Swit- 
zerland, and other poems, 630. 

, Robert, his poems, 630. 

Moore, Edward, his Foundling, and other 
plays, 550. 

, Thomas, his Irish Melodies, Sacred 

Songs, Lalla Rookh, and other works, 
628. 

Morality-Plays, 46, 158, 179-181. 

More, Hannah, her Shepherd of Salisbury 
Plain, Practical Piety, and other works, 
602. 

, Henry, his Psychodia Platonica, Con- 

jectura Cabbalistica, 368, 369. 

, Sir Thomas, 198 ; his life, 134, 135-140 ; 

his History of the Life and Death of Ed- 
ward V., and of the Usurpation of Rich- 
ard III., 136; his Utopia, 137-139; his 
Dialogue, 144. 

Morier, James, his novels, 634. 

Morley, George, his Treatises concerning 
the Church of Rome, etc., 502. 

, Henry, 643, 645. 

, John, 646, 648. 

Morris, William, 644, 645, 646, 647. 

Mountagu, Richard, his Diatribe on the 
History of Tithes, 343. 

Mozley, I. B., 647. 

Mulgrave, Earl of, see Sheffield, John. 

Mulock, Dinah Maria, 643. 

Mun, Thomas, his England's Treasure by 
Foreign Trade, 471. 

Munday, Anthony, 259, 276; his Discoverie 
of Edmund Campion, Mirrour of Muta- 
bilitie, Fountaine of Fame, Paine of 



Pleasure, 259; his Watchwoord to Eng- 
lande, and various other works, 260. 
Mystery-Plays, 46. 

N. 

Napier, John, his Plaine Discovery of Rev- 
elation, Miririci Logarithmorum Canonis 
Descriptio, 365. 

, Sir William, his War in the Peninsu- 
la, 639. 

Nash, Thomas, 238, 239, 269, 272, 275. 320; 
his Isle of Dogs, Summer's Last Will and 
Testament, 269. 

Neckham, Alexander, his Treatise on Sci- 
ence, 48. 

Needbam, Marchamont, his Mercurius Bri- 
tannicus, Pragmaticus, and Politicus, 486. 

Netter, Thomas, 125. 

Neville, Alexander, his translation of Sen- 
eca's (Edipus, 254. 

Newbury, William of, his Historia Rerum 
Anglicarum, 38, 39. 

Newcastle, Duke and Duchess of, their va- 
rious works, 430. 

Newman, Francis W., 642. 

, John Henry, 641, 645, 646. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, his life, 470. 471, 500, 
516; his Principia, Observations upon the 
Prophecies, Chronology of Ancient King- 
doms, 471. 

, Thomas, his Seneca, 254. 

Niccols, Richard, A Mirror for Magistrates, 
234 

Nicholas of Guildford, 63. 

Nightingale, Florence, 645. 

North, Christopher, see Wilson, John. 

, Roger, his Examen, Lives, 484. 

, Sir Thomas, his translation of Plu- 
tarch's Lives and Calilah i Dumnah, 195. 

Norton, Caroline E., 644. 

, Thomas, his Translation of Calvin's 

Institutes, of Newell's Greater Catechism, 
251; his Gorboduc, 251-253. 

Nuce, Thomas, his translation of Seneca's 
Octavia, 254. 

o. 

Occleve, Thomas, 116, 118, 119, 264, 321 ; his 
Translation of De Regimine Principum, 
119. 

Oldham, John, 408; his Satyrs upon the 
Jesuits, odes, paraphrases and transla- 
tions, 453. 

Oldmixon, John, his Tasso's Amyntas, 
Grove, Memoirs of North Britain .and 
Ireland, History of England, 563. 

Opie, Amelia, her stories, 633. 

Ormin, Ormulum, 62, 63. 

Orosius, his Universal History, 25, 26, 36. 

Otway, Thomas, 444, 454; his life, 426-428; 
his Alcibiades, Don Carlos, 426; his Caius 
Marius, 427, 428; his Orphan, 427, 428, 
533; his Venice Preserved, and other 
plays, 427, 428. 

Overbury, Sir Thomas, his Wife, now a 
Widowe, 317. 

Owen, Richard, 643. 

Oxnead, John of, his Chronicon, 39. 



IXD£X. 



GG1 



p. 



Paine, Thomas, 601; his Rights of Man, 
600. 

Paley, William, his Moral and Political 
Philosophy, Horae Paulina?, Evidences of 
Christianity, Natural Theology, 601. 

Palgrave, Francis Turner, 645. 

Paris, Matthew, 39, 44; his Historia Major, 
39. 

Parker, Matthew, 191, 198; his De Antiqui- 
tate Britannicae Ecclesiae, 191 ; his trans- 
lation of the Psalms, 228. 

, Dr. Samuel, 411, 412; his Latin His- 
tory of his Own Time, 411, 412; his 
Physico-Theological Essays and other 
works, 501. 

Parnell, Thomas, 532, 533, 540; his Hermit, 
533. 

Pater, Walter N. f 646. 

Pattison, Mark, 647. 

Paynter, William, his translations of Boc- 
caccio's Decameron and Bandello's Ro- 
meo and Juliet, 195. 

Tecock, Reginald, his life, 125-127; his Re- 
pressor of Overmuch Blaming of the 
Clergy, 126. 

Peele, George, 248; his life, 262, 263, 264, 
267, 275; his Tale of Troy, Araygncrnent 
of Paris, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 
Famous Chronicle of Edward I., and 
other works, 202, 263. 

Penn, William, his life, 498, 499; his Sandy 
Foundation Shaken, No Cross, No 
Crown, Innocency with her Open Face, 
Accounts of the Province of Pennsyl- 
vania, Rise and Progress of the People 
called Quakers, Travels in Holland and 
Germany, 499. 

Pepys, Samuel, his Diary, 4S2. 

Percy, Thomas, his Reliques of Ancient 
English Poetry, 607, 60S. 

Periods, the Four, of English Literature, 2, 
3. 

Tetrarch, 82, 83, 84; his Griselda, 82, 95, 96. 

Petty, William, his Advice to Samuel 
Hartlib, 463, 464; his Treatise of Taxes 
and Contributions, 472. 

Phaer, Thomas, his translation of the 
^Eneid, 194, 221; A Mirror for Magis- 
trates, 234. 

Philips, Ambrose, 529, 530, 535, 574; his 
Life of John Williams, 52y ; his Pastorals, 

529, 536. 

, Catherine, her poems, 430. 

, John, his Blenheim, Splendid Shil- 
ling, Cider, 528, 529. 

Pitt," Christopher, his translations and 
poems, 551. 

Plimsoll, Samuel, 646. 

Pomfret, John, his Poems, 454. 

Poor, Bishop, his Ancren Riwle, 64. 

Pope, Alexander, 13, 454, 512, 516, 517, 529, 

530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535, 547, 552, 559, 
561, 562, 586, 587, 589; his life, 535-540, 
541-546; his Pastorals, 529, 530, 536; his 
Iliad, 530, 539, 540, 547; his Miscellanies, 

531, 542; his Shakespeare, 533, 540, 542, 
561, 562; his Dunciad, 533, 534, 541, 542- 
544, 548; his January and May, 96, 536; 
his Essay on Criticism, 536, 537, 539, 561 ; 
his Messiah, translations from Statins 



and Ovid, 538; his Rape of the Lock, 
538, 539; his Odyssey, 540; his Epistle on 
Taste, 543; his Essay on Man, 543-545, 
561; his Moral Essays and other works, 
543. 

Pordage, Samuel, his Azaria and Hushai, 
Seneca's Troades, tragedies, 423; his 
Medal Revers'd, 440. 

Porson, Richard, his editions of Euripides 
and iEschylus, and other works, 640. 

Porter, Anna Maria, her novels, 633. 

, Jane, her Thaddeus of Warsaw, Scot- 
tish Chiefs and other works, 633. 

Prideaux, Humphrey, his Life of Mahomet, 
Old and New Testament connected, 484. 

Priestley, Joseph, 601. 

Prior, Matthew, 446, 547; his life, 509, 510; 
his Country Mouse and City Mouse, 507, 
508, 509; his Ballad on the Taking of 
>.amur, 509; his Carmen Seculare, Mis- 
cellaneous Works, 510. 

Procter, Adelaide Anne, 644. 

, Bryan W., 645. 

Proctor, R. A., 647. 

, Thomas, his Gorgious Gallery of Gal- 
lant Inventions, 228. 

Prynne, William, his Health's Sickness, 
fjnloveliness of Lovelocks, Ilistrio-Mastix, 
King's Supreme Ecclesiastical Jurisdic- 
tion, 374. 

Purchas, Samuel, his Pilgrimes, 348. 

Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 641, 645. 

Puttenham, George, his Arte of English 
Poesie, etc., 221, 222. 

Pye, Henry James, his Farringdon-Hill, 
Alfred, 614. 



Q. 



Quarles, Francis, 306 ; his Feast for Wormes, 
Pentaloyia. Hadassa, Argalus and Parthe- 
nia, Job Militant, Divine Fancies, Em- 
blems, and other works, 314, 315. 



R. 

Radcliffe, Ann, her Mysteries of Udolpho, 
602. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 189, 241, 242, 245, 272, 
276, 2S8, 313; his life, 349-352; his Report 
of the Truth of the Fight about the lies 
of Azores, etc., 350; his Discoverie of the 
Erapyre of Guiana, 351; his History of 
the World, 351, 352. 
I Ralston, W. H. S., 646. 

1 Ramsay, Allan, his Poems, 546; his Mis- 
cellany, 546, 550; his Gentle Shepherd, 
546, 547, 571. 

Randolph, Thomas, his plays, 300, 301. 

Rawdon, Owen, 228. 

Rawlinson, George, 647. 

Ray, John, his Catalogues of Plants, Col- 
lection of Proverbs, Wisdom of God, 
Miscellaneous Discourses, 466 ; his other 
works, 467. 

Reade, Charles, 643. 644. 

Reeve, Clara, her Old English Baron, 602. 

Reid,, Thomas, his Intellectual Powers of 
Man, Active Powers of the Human Mind, 
Inquiry into the Human Mind, 597. 



662 



INDEX. 



Religious Discussion, two great topics of, 
51-53. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 598; his Discourses 
on Art, 601. 

Ricardo, David, his works on political 
economy, 641. 

Richardson, Samuel, 591, 632; his life, 570- 
573, 574, 579; his Pamela, 570-572,. 573, 
583; Clarissa Harlowe, 572, 573; Sir 
Charles Grandison, 573. 

Rivers, Lord, see Woodville, Anthony. 

Robert of Avesbury, 39. 

■ — Brunne, 64, 65. 

Gloucester, 64. 

Robertson, Frederick "William, 641. 

, William, his History of Scotland, of 

the Reign of Charles V., of America, 596. 

Robinson, Clement, his Handefull of Pleas- 
ant Delites, 228. 

Rochester, Earl of, see Wilmot, John. 

Roger of Hoveden, 39. 

Wendover, 39. 

Rogers, J. E. Thorold, 647. 

, John, his Matthew's Bible, 145. 

, Samuel, his Ode to Superstition, 

Pleasures of Memory, Italy, Table Talk, 
and other works, 627. 

, Captain Woodes, his Voyage Round 

the World, 569. 

Rolle, Richard, 66, 67; his Pricke of Con- 
science, 67, 102. 

Roscoe, William, his biographies, 639. 

Roscommon, Earl of, see Dillon, Went- 
worth. 

Ross, Alexander, 407; his History of the 
Jews, Life of Christ, Arcana Microcosmi 
and other works, 352. 

Rossetti, Christina, 645. 

, Dante Gabriel,, 646, 647. 

Rowe, Nicholas, 531; his Ambitious Step- 
mother, Jane Shore, and other plays, 
Life of Shakespeare, 531 ; his translation 
of Lucan's Pharsalia, 531. 

Rowley, William, his comedies, 298. 

Roy, William, his Burying of the Mass, 
178, 179. 

Ruskin, John, 643. 

Russell, John, Earl, 643, 644. 

Rymer, Thomas, 401, 437, 444, 512; his 
criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher's 
plays, 401. 



s. 



S., R., his Phoenix Nest, 228. 

Sackville, Charles, Earl of Dorset, 420, 432, 
434, 453, 508, 509, 519, 529 ; his Song writ- 
ten at Sea, 420. 

, Thomas, 13 ; his life, 230, 231, 275 : his 

Gorboduc, 230, 237,251-253,433; his In- 
duction, 231, 232, 234, 303. 

Saewulf, 44. 

Salmasius, his Royal Defence of Charles I., 
387-389. 

Sandys, George, his Relation of a Journey, 
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Paraphrase of the 
Psalms, 319. 

Savage, Richard, his Wanderer, Bastard, 
Progress of a Divine, 553, 554. 

Savilc, Sir Henry, his translations from 
Tacitus, 197. 



I Scandinavians, 8. 
j ychliemann, Dr., 647. 

j Scott, Sir Walter, 129, 158, 608, 626, 632, 
633; his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor- 
der, Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, 
Lady of the Lake, and other poems, 626; 
his novels, 626, 632, 633. 

Sedgwick, Henry, 646. 

Sedley, Sir Charles, 419, 423,434,444,453, 
508, 509; his Antony and Cleopatra, Mul- 
berry Garden, 419. 

Selden, John, 304, 382; his life, 341-345 ; 
his Analecton Anglo-Britannicon Libri 
Duo, Duello, Titles of Honour, De Diis 
Syris, 342; his History of Tithes, 342, 
343; his Tracts, 343; his Marmora Arun- 
delliana, 344 ; his Mare Clausum, 344, 345 ; 
his De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta 
Disciplinam Ebraeorum, Uxor Ebraica, 
345 ; his Table Talk, 345. 

Senior, Nassau William, his works on poli- 
tical economy, 641. 

Settle, Elkanah, 441; his Empress of 
Morocco and other tragedies, 425, 436. 

Seward, Anna, her Life of Dr. Darwin, 602. 

Shadwell, Thomas, 423, 425, 435, 441, 488 ; 
his comedies, The Sullen Lovers, The 
Humorists, etc., his tragedies, Psyche, 
The Libertine, etc., 423-425; his Medal 
of John Bayes, 440, 441. 

Shairp, J. C, 647. 

Shakespeare, William, 13, 71, 84, 113, 143, 
189, 194, 195, 196, 223, 224, 235, 242, 245, 
252, 253, 254, 258, 265, 267, 268, 269, 272, 
275, 286, 288, 289, 290, 292, 294, 295, 296, 
297, 298, 301, 304, 305, 349, 352, 422, 427, 
432, 433, 519, 531, 542; his life, 276-285; 
his King Henry VI., 268, 269; his Venus 
and Adonis, 223, 278, 281; his Lucrece, 
223,278; his Richard II., Richard III., 
279; his Romeo and Juliet, 195, 279, 280, 
281; his Love's Labour's Lost, 278, 280; 
his King Henry IV., 280, 281; his Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, 280, 281; his 
Merchant of Venice, 280, 281, 455; his 
Passionate Pilgrim, 280; his Much Ado 
about Nothing, Henry V, Merry Wives 
of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, 281 ; 
his Henry IV., 280, 281; his Comedy of 
Errors, 278; his Othello, 281, 401; his 
Measure for Measure, 248, 282; his Mac- 
beth, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, 
281; his King Lear, 277, 281; his Antony 
and Cleopatra, 281,437; his Cymbeline, 
Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, 282; his 
Tempest, 196, 282, 418; his Henry VIII., 
282,283; his Sonnets, 223, 283, 284; bis 
King John, 534; his spurious plays, 285. 

Shakespeare, editions of, Rowe's, 531 ; 
Pope's, 533, 561; Theobald's, 533, 561; 
Warburton's, 561; Hanmer's, 561, 590; 
Johnson's, 561, 590, 591; Malone's, 602; 
Collier's, 644. 

Sheffield, John, Earl of Mulgrave, 422, 427, 
436; his Essay on Satire, 422, 438; his 
Essay on Poetry, Julius Caesar, Marcus 
Brutus, 422. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13, 629; his Zas- 
trozzi, Rosicrucian, Queen Mab, Alastor, 
Adonais, and other works; 629. 

, Mrs., her Frankenstein and other 

Avorks, 634. 



INDEX. 



663 



Shenstone, William, 548, 549, 551 ; his Men, 
Manners and Things, Pastoral Ballad, 
Schoolmistress, 550. 

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, his Rivals, 
Duenna, School for Scandal, Critic, 608. 

Sherlock, William, his Practical Discourses 
concerning Death and a Future Judg- 
ment, 503. 

Shirley, James, 276; his plays, 299, 636. 

Sibbes, Richard, his Saints' Cordials, 
Bruised Reede and Smoking Flax, 370. 

Sidney, Algernon, his Discourses concern- 
ing Government, 472. 

, Sir Philip, 189, 203, 208, 2.°.8, 2S9, 247, 

248, 302; his life, 216-220, his Lady of 
May, 216; his translation of the Psalms 
of David, 217; his Arcadia, 217, 218, 219, 
314, 571 : his Apologie for Poetrie, 203, 
218, 221; his Astrophel and Stella Son- 
nets, 219, 283. 

Skelton, John, 116, 158; his life, 151, 152; 
his Speculum Principis, 152; his poem on 
the Death of King Edward IV., Elegy 
upon the Death of the Earl of Northum- 
berland, 153; his Bowge of Court, 153, 
154; his Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, 154; 
his Speak, Parrot, 155; his Why Come ye 
Not to Court? 156; his Colin Clout, 157, 
158, 240; his Tunnyng of Elynur Rum- 
myng, 158; his Magnificence, 158, 180. 

Smectymnuus, 378, 379, 469. 

Smith, Adam, his Moral Sentiments, 
Wealth of Nations, 597. 

, Horace and James, their Rejected Ad- 
dresses, 637. 

, Sydney, his Sermons, Speeches and 

Letters, 637. 

, Sir Thomas, his life, 190, 191; his De 

Republica Anglorum, 191. 

Smollett, Tobias, 578, 579, 603; his life, 583, 
585; bis Regicide, Tears of Scotland, 
Alceste, Advice, Reproof, 583; his Rode- 
rick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdi- 
nand Count Fathom, translation of Don 
Quixote, Critical Review, 584; his His- 
tory of England, 5S4, 585, 595; his Sir 
Lancelot Greaves, 584; his Travels, 
Humphrey Clinker, 585. 

Somerville, Mary, 641. 

, William, his Chase, Field Sports, and 

other works, 549. 

South, Robert, his sermons, 503. 

Southern, Thomas, 445; his Loyal Brother, 
443, 452; his Disappointment, Fatal Mar- 
riage, Oroonoko, and other plays, 452. 

Southey, Robert, 129, 623, 624, 629, 630; his 
life, 624-626; his Wat Tyler, Joan of 
Arc, 625; bis Thalaba, Madoc, Curse of 
Kehama, Roderick, 626; his Book of the 
Church and other prose works, 626. 

Southwell, Robert, his St. Peter's Com- 
plaint, Maeonise, 250. 

Speed, John, his History of Great Britaine, 
Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, 
Cloud of Witnesses, 348. 

Spelman, Sir Henry, his Concilia, Decreta, 
Leges, Constitutiones in Re Ecclesiastica 
Orbis Britannici, 346. 

Spence, Joseph, 513, 552; his Essay on 
Pope's Odyssey, Polymetis, 513. 

Spenser, Edmund, 13, 113, 189, 221, 238, 248, 
261, 275, 303, 305, 306, 309, 321, 335, 352, 
369, 393, 402, 408, 530, 549; his life, 2:J9- 



247,275,349, 350; his Faery Queen, 129, 
239, 241, 243, 244-247, 304, 306, 393, 470, 
586; his version of the Visions of' Pe- 
trarch, 240, 242; his Shepheardes Calen- 
der, 221, 240, 241, 529; his Complaints, 
Daphnaida, Colin Clout's Come Home 
Again, 242; his Amoretti, 243, 283; his 
Epithalaraium, View of the Present State 
of Ireland, Hymns, Prothalamium, 243; 
Spenserian stanza, 244, 369. 

Spottiswoode, John, his History of the 
Church of Scotland, 353. 

Sprat, Thomas, 467, 519; his History of the 
Royal Society, his poems, 467. 

Stanhope, Earl, 639, 644; his histories, 639. 

Stanihurtt, Richard, 224, 275, 320; his De 
Rebus in Hibernia Gestis Libri iv.. Life 
of St. Patrick, 191; his translation of the 
vEneid, 195, 196. 

Stanley, A. P., 643, 645, 647. 

Steele, Richard, 530,538,632; his life, 518, 
519, 520, 521, 522, 524, 525, 526, 527, 528. 
529; his Procession, 520; his Christian 
Hero, Funeral, 522; his Tender Husband, 
Lying Lover, 523; the Tatler, 524, 525; 
the Spectator, 524, 525; his Crisis, 526; 
his State of Roman Catholic Religion, 
527 ; his Conscious Lovers, 527, 550, 575 ; 
his School of Action, Gentleman, 528; 
Guardian, 530. 

Stephen, Leslie, 646, 647. 

Stepney, George, 453, 508, 520. 

Sterne, Lawrence, his Tristam Shandy, 
Sermons of Mr. Yorick, Sentimental 
Journey, 585. 

Sternhold and Hopkins's Psalms, 228, 229. 

Stewart, Dugald, his philosophical works, 
640. 

StilliriguYet, Edward, his sermons and 
other works, 503. 

Stow, John, 224, 275, 348; his Summary of 
English Chronicles, Annals, Survey of 
London, 224. 

Strode, Ralph, 85, 110. 

Strype, John, his Memorials of Archbishop 
Cranmer, Lives of Sir Thomas Smith 
and John Aylmer, 4S4. 

Stubbes, Philip, his Anatomic of Abuses, 
204, 205. 

StubbB, William, 646. 

Studley, John, his translation of Seneca's 
Hjppolytus, Medea, Agamemnon, Her- 
cules O^taeus, 254. 

Suckling, Sir John, 320; his Aglaura, Bren- 
noralt, Goblins, 323. 

Surrey, Earl of, 151, 170, 173, 219, 248; his 
life, 174, 175; his Satire against the Citi- 
zens of London, 175 ; his Paraphrases of 
portions of the Bible, 175, 176; his son- 
nets, poems, etc., 176, 227; his transla- 
tion of the ^Eneid, 176 177. 

Swift, Jonathan, 512, 523, 526, 532, 535, 542, 
543, 559; his life, 513-517; his Contests 
and Dissensions between the Nobles and 
Commons, 514, 515; his Tale of a Tub, 
515, 532, 617; his Battle of the Books, 
controversial pamphlets, 515; his Dra- 
pier's Letters, 515, 516; his Gulliver's 
Travels, 516, 517, 542, 617; his Miscella- 
nies, 517. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 645, 646, 648. 

Sydenham, Thomas, 467, 468. 



6G-1 



INDEX. 



Sylvester, Joshua, his translation of Du 

Bartas, 197. 
Symonds, 0. A., 647, 648. 



Talfotird, Thomas Noon, his Ion and other 
works, 634. 

Tate, Nahum, 444, 446, 453, 531; his Poems, 
Brutus of Alba, Loyal General and other 
plays, 453; Tate and Brady's Psalms, 
453. 

Taverner, Richard, his Bible, 145. 

Taylor, Sir Henry, 644. 

, Jeremy, his life, 370-373; his Episco- 
pacy Asserted, 371 ; his Liberty of Proph- 
esying, 371, 372; his Great Exemplar of 
Sanctity and Holy Life, Holy Living, 
Holy Dying, Course of Sermons, Golden 
Grove, 372; his Unum Necessarium, Due- 
tor Dubitantium, Worthy Communicant, 
Dissuasion from Popery, 373; his Meas- 
ures and Offices of Friendship, 373, 430. 

, John, his Travels in Germanie, Pen- 

nyles Pilgrimage, and other works, 313, 
314. 

, Tom, 647. 

Temple, Sir William, 474, 485, 513, 514, 515; 
his Essay on Government, Memoirs, Es- 
says on Gardening, Health and Long 
Life, Ancient and Modern Learning, 486. 

Tenison, Thomas, his sermons and other 
works, 503. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 13, 642, 643, 644, 645, 646, 
647 ; his In Memoriam, Idyls of the Kin?, 
64S. 

Teutons, 7, 8, 9-12. - 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 635, 642, 
643, 644, 645, 647 ; his Vanity Fair and 
other novels, 635. 

, Miss, 646. 

Theobald, Lewis, 533, 542; his translations 
of Sophocles and Aristophanes, trage- 
dies, Shakespeare, 533. 

Thirlwall, Connop, 638, 647; his History of 
Greece, 638. 

Thomas of Erceldoune, 63. 

Thomson, James, 553. 571; his life, 547-549, 
550; his Country Life, 547; his Seasons, 
547, 548; his Liberty, Tancred and Sigis- 
munda, and other plays, 548; his Castle 
of Indolence, 549. 

Thrale, Mrs., 593. 

Tickell, Thomas, 529, 530, 535; his contri- 
butions to the Guardian, 530; his transla- 
tion of Homer, 530, 531 ; his Prospect of 
Peace, and other poems, 531. 

Tighe, Mary, her Psyche, 630. 

Tillotson, John, his sermons, 500. 

Tiptoft, John, 115; his translation of Cice- 
ro's De Amicitia, 129. 

Todhunter, L, 647. 

Tourneur, Cyril. 276; his plays, 298. 

Transition English, 3, 31-71. 

Trench, Richard Cbenevix, 643. 

Trevelyan, G. O., 647. 

Trevisa, John, 99; his Translation of Hig- 
den's Polychronicon, 109, 115, 116. 

Trivet, Nicholas, Annales Sex Regum An- 
glise. 39. 

Trokelowe, John of. his Annales, 39. 



Trollope, Anthony, 643, 644, 646. 

, Mrs.. 634. 

Troyes, Chiestien of, 43. 44; his Erec and 
Enide, translations of Map's Lancelot and 
Graal romances, Percival le Gallois, 44. 

Turbervile, George, 237; his translations 
of Ovid's Heroical Epistles, Mantuan's 
Eclogues, Italian Tragical Tales, 195; his 
Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 
236. 

Turcot, his Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, 
39. 

Turner, Dr. Francis, his Animadversions 
on the Naked Truth, 412. 

, Sharon, his History of England, 639. 

Tusser, Thomas, his Hundred Good Points, 
Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 
229, 230. 

Twyne, Thomas, his translation of the 
^Eneid, 194. 

Tyndal, William, his life, 142, 143, 144, 145 ; 
his translation of the Enchiridion of 
Erasmus, 142; his Translation of the 
New Testament, 143, 144, 145, 168. 

Tyndall, John, 645. 

Tytler, Patrick Fraser, his History of Scot- 
land, 638. 

u. 

Udall, Nicholas, his life, 181, 182; his 
Floures for Latin Spekvnge, 181, 182; 
his Ralph Roister Doister, 1S2, 183, 251, 
252, 253. 

Usher, James, his life, 340, 341, 346; his 
continuation of Jewel's Apology, Dis- 
course on the Religion Anciently Pro- 
fessed by the Irish and British, and nu- 
merous other works, 341. 



V. 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 448, 451, 488; his Re- 
lapse, 451, 534; his Provoked Wife, JEsop, 
and other plays, 451. 

Vaughan, Henry, his Poems, Silex Scintil- 
lans, and other works, 405. 

Vercelli Book, the, 19, 20. 

Vergil, Polydore, his English Chronicle, 146. 

Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 419, 
423. 439, 543; his Rehearsal, 419, 420, 507, 
542, 574. 

w. 

Wace, 36, 38, 39, 40; his Brut, 39, 61; his 
Roman de Rou, 39. 

Wales, Gerald of, his Expugnatio Hiber- 
nise, 39. 

Wallace, A. R., 647, 648. 

Waller, Edmund, 323, 401, 433, 519; his 
love-sonss and other works, 401, 402. 

Wallis, John, 366. 367, 466; his Arithmetica 
Infinitorum, 463, 470; his controversy 
with Hobbes, 463. 

Walpole, Horace, 5S6. 604 ; his Catalogue of 
Authors of England, Anecdotes of Paint- 
ing, 5S6; his Castle of Otranto, Historic 
Doubts, Letters. 5S7. 

, Spencer, 64S. 



* 



IX DFX 



GO;' 



Walsh, William, his Dialogue concerning 
Women, and poems, 454. 

Walsingham, Thomas, his Historia Angli- 
cana, 125. 

Walton, Izaak, 345, 473; his Compleat An- 
gler, "Lives, 472. 

Warburton, William, his life, 560-562; his 
Translations, 561 ; his Inquiry into Prodi- 
gies and Miracles, Alliance between 
Church and State, Commentary on Pope's 
Works, Edition of Shakespeare, 561. 

Ward, Adolphua William, 646. 

, Robert P., his novels, 634. 

Warner, William, 189,249,276; his Albion's 
England, 249. 

Warton, Joseph, 235, 586, 593; his Genius 
and Writings of Pope, 586. 

, Thomas, his Faery Queen of Spenser, 

History of English Poetry, 586. 

Watson, Thomas, his version of Antigone, 
248; his Passionate Centurie of Love, 248, 
262; hi3 Amyntas, Italian Madrigals 
Englished, Tears of Fancy. 249. 

Witts, Isaac, his Hymns, Psalms, Divine 
and Moral Songs, Logic, 559. 

Webhe, William, his Discourse of English 
Poetrie, 221. 

Webster, Augusta, 645. 

, John, 27 3; his plays, 298, 299. 

Wendover, Roger of, his Flores Historia- 
rura, 39. 

Wesley, Charles, his Psalms and Hymns, 
560. 

, John, his Account of the Methodists, 

Wisdom of God in the Creation, 560. 

West, Gilbert, his Odes of Pindar, n49. 

Whately, Richard, his Logic, Rhetoric and 
other works, 641. 

Wheloc, Abraham, 346. 

Whetstone, George, his Heptameron, Pro- 
mos and Cassandra, 248. 

Winston, William, his Theory of the Earth, 
555. 

White, Gilbert, his Natural History and 
Antiquities of Selborne, 601, 602. 

, Henry Kirke, his works, 630. 

White tie Id, George, 560. 

Whitehead, Paul, his Gymnasiad, 551. 

, William, 551, 581; his poems and 

plays, 551. 

Whittingham, William, his translation of 
the Xew Testament, 198. 

Wiclif, John, 125; his life, 99, 108, 109, 115; 
his Translation of the Bible, 108, 109; his 
De Dominio Divino, 109. 

Wilkins, John, 365, 415, 463, 467,469; his 
Discovery of a New World, Discourse 



concerning a New Planet, Mercury, 365; 
his Essay toward a Real Character, etc., 
366. 

William of Malraesbury, 18, 36, 37. 

Newbury, 38, 39. 

Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 419, 421, 
426, 438, 444, 453; his Upon Nothing, 421. 

Wilson, John, his Noctes Anibrosianae and 
other works, 637. 

Winter, Thomas, his translation of Du Bar- 
tas, 197. 

Wireker, Nigel, 53, 54; his Corruptions of 
the Church, 53; his Brunellus, or Specu- 
lum Stultorum, 53, 54. 

Wither, George, his life, 306-309; his 
Abuses Stript and Whipt, pastorals, 307 ; 
his Emblems, 308, 314; his Britain's Re- 
membrancer, and other works, 308. 

Wolcot, John, his satires, 614. 

Wood, Anthony a, 412, 482 ; his History and 
Antiquities of the University of Oxford, 
Athena? Oxonienses, 483. 

Woodville, Anthony, Lord Rivers, 115, 129; 
his translation of Dictes and Sayings of 
the Philosophers, 128, 129. 

Worcester, Florence of, his Chronicon ex 
Chronieis ab Initio Mundi usque ad An- 
num Christi, 1117; deductum, 39. 

Worde, Wynken de, 122. 

Wordsworth, William, 13; his life, 617-623, 
624; his Excursion, 618, S22; his Descrip- 
tive Sketches, 619, 620 ; his Evening Walk, 
619; his Lyrical Ballads, 620, 621; his 
Prelude, 621 ; his Ecclesiastical Sketches, 
622; his Yarrow Revisited, 623. 

Wotton, Sir Henry, 282, 472; his Elements 
of Architecture, Reliquue Wottonianuj, 
345. 

Wren, Christopher, 463. 

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 151,176,177; his life, 
170-173; his Paraphrase of the Seven 
Penitential Psalms, 171; his satires, 172, 
173; his songs and sonnets, balades, ron- 
deaux, etc., 173, 174, 227. 

Wycherley, William, 449, 488, 512, 536; his 
Love in a Wood, Gentleman Dancing- 
Master, 448; his Plain Dealer, Country 
Wife, 449, 450. 

Wyntoun, Andrew of, his Oryginale Crony- 
kil of Scotland, 121. 



Y. 

Young, Edward, 552 ; his Last Day, Busiris, 
Love of Fame, Night Thoughts, 552. 



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PATTERSON'S SPELLER AND ANALYZER. 

176 Pages. 

Designed for the use of higher classes in schools and academies. 

This Speller contains a carefully selected list of over 6,000 words, which em- 
brace all such as a graduate of an advanced class should know how to spell. 
"Words seldom if ever used have been carefully excluded. The book teaches as 
much of the derivation and formation of words as can be learned in the time al- 
lotted to Spelling. 

PATTERSON'S BLANK EXERCISE BOOK. 

For Written Spelling. Small size. Bound in stiff paper covers. 
40 Pag-es. 

PATTERSON'S BLANK EXERCISE BOOK. 

For Written Spelling. Large size. Bound in board covers. 
72 Pag-es. 

Each of these Exercise Books is ruled, numbered, and otherwise arranged to 
correspond with the Spellers. Each book contains directions by which written 
exercises in Spelling may be reduced to a system. 

There is also an Appendix, for Correeted Words, which is in a convenient form 
for re-mews. 

"By the use of these "Blank Exercise "Books a class of four hundred may , 
in thirty minutes, spell fifty words each, making a total of 20,000 words, and. 
carefully criticise and correct the lesson; each student thereby receiving tht 
benefit of spelling the entire lesson and correcting mistakes. 



OLNEY'S SERIES OF ARITHMETICS. 

A full Common School Course in Two Books. 

OLNEY'S PRIMARY ARITHMETIC, - 

OLNEY'S ELEMENTS OF ARITHMETIC, 

A few of the characteristic features of the Primary Arithme- 
tic are : 

/. Adaptability to use in our Prim^.ry Schools— furnishing models of exer 
cises on every topic, suited to class exercises and to pupils' work in their seats. 

2. It is based upon a thorough analysis of the child-micd and of the ele- 
ments of the Science of Numbers. 

3. Simplicity of plan and naturalness of treatment. 

4. Recognizes the distinction bettreei learning how to obtain a result 
and committing that result to memory. 

5. Is full of practical expedients, helpful both to teacher and pupil. 
(J. Embodies the spirit of the Kindergarten methods. 

7. Is beautifully illustrated by pictures which are object lessons, and 
not were ornaments. 

The Elements of Arithmetic. 

This is a practical treatise on Arithmetic, furnishing in one book of 308 
pages aii the arithmetic compatible with a well-balanced common-school course, 
or necessary to a good general English education. 

The processes usually si) led Jfenlal Arithmetic are here assimi- 
lated and made the basis of the more formal and mechanical methods 
called Written Arithmetic. 

Therefore, by the use of this book, from one-third to one-half the lime 
usually devoted to Arithmetic in our Intermediate, Grammar, and 
Common Schools can be saved, and better results secured. 



These books will both be found entirely fresh and original in plan, and 
in mechanical execution ahead of any offered to the public. No expense has 
been spared to give to Professor Olney's Series of J/alhematics a dress 
worthy of their original and valuable featwes. 

.A Teacher's 

HAND-BOOK OF ARITHMETICAL EXERCISES, 

to accompany the ELEMENTS OF ARITHMETIC, is now ready. This book 
furnishes an exhaustless mine from which the teacher can draw for exercise 
both mental and written in class-room drill, and for extending the range of topics 
when this is practicable. 

THE SCIENCE OF ARITHMETIC, 

The advanced book of the Series, is a full and complete course for High 
Schools, and om an entirely original plan. 

SHELDON & COMPANY, 

NEW YORK. 



OLNEY'S HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 



There is one feature which characterizes this series, so unique and yet so emi- 
nently practical, that we feel desirous of calling special attention to it. It is the 
facility with which the books can be used for Classes of alt Grades, 
and in Schools of the widest diversity of purpose. Each volume in the 
series is so constructed that it may be used with equal ease by the youngest and 
least disciplined, and by those who in more mature years enter upon the study 
with more ample preparation. This will be seen most clearly by a reference to 
the separate volumes. 

Introduction to Algebra 

Complete School Algebra 

University Algebra 

Test Examples in Algebra 

Elements of Geometry. Separate 

Elements of Trigonometry. Separate 

Introduction to Geometry. Parti. Separate 

Geometry and Trigonometry. School Edition 

Geometry and Trigonometry, without Tables of 
Logarithms. University Edition 

Geometry and Trigonometry, with Tables. Uni- 
versity Edition 

Tables of Logarithms. Flexible covers 

Geometry. University Edition. Parts I, II, and III. . . 

General Geometry and Calculus 

Bellows' } s Trigonometry . ! 



There is scarcely a College or Normal School in the 
United States that is not now using some of Prof. Olney's 
Mathematical works. 

They are original and fresh— attractive to both Teacher 
and Scholar. 

Prof. Olney has a very versatile mind, and has suc- 
ceeded to a wonderful degree in removing the difficulties 
in the science of Mathematics, and even making this study 
attractive to the most ordinary scholar. At the same time 
•bis books are thorough and comprehensive. 

NEW YORK: 

SHELDON & COMPANY, 






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s?r. 



Sheldon & Company's Text- Hooks. 

Tlie Science of Government in Connection with 
American Institutions. By Joseph Aldex, D.D., LL.D.. 
Pres. of Stare Normal School, Albany. 1 vol 12mo. 
Adapted to tie "-nts c: H.:_-l 5:"_c:".= inc. Colleges. 

Alden's Citizen's Manual: a Text-Book on Government, in 
Connection with American Institutions, adapted to the -wants of 

Common Schools. It is in the form of questions and answers. 

By Joseph Audes, D.D., LL.D. 1 vol. 1 610.0. 

Hereafter no American can 1 e said * : 1 : see not thoroughly • 

1 understand the formation of c A rominent divine has 

that " every y : a ag person -1 ild carefully and conscientiously be taught I 
distinctive ideas which constitute the substance of our Constitution, and which 
determine the policy of our politics ; and to this end there ought forthwith to 

:>duced into "our schools a simple, comprehensive mannal whereby the j 
needed tuition should be implanted at that early period. 

Schmitz's Manual of Ancient History; from the Re- 
motest Tim:? to the Overthrow of the Western Empire. A. d. ' 
476, with copious Chronolo_i: :.l Tables and Index. By Dr. 
Leoxhakd Scequtz, T. R. S. E., Edinburgh. 

T7te Elements of Intellectual Philosophy. By Fhaxcts 

Waylaxd, D.D. 1 vol. 12m :■ 

This clearly-written book, from the pen of a e molar of eminent ability, and 
who has had the largest experience in the education of the human mind, 
id unquestionably at the head oi text-booke in Intellectual Philosophy. 

An Outline of the Xecessary Laws of Thought: 
A T : lied Logic. By Wikham Thom- I 

o D.D... Provost of (Jig Queen's College, Oxford, 1 vol 12mo. 

Cloth. 

This book has been adopted as a regular test-book in Harvard, Yale, 
Eochester, New York University, &C 

Fairchilds' ALoral Philosophy : or. The Science of 

Obligation. By J. K Fatbchxlds, President of Oberiin 

1 vol 12mo. 

The aim of this volume is to ; r" ' mc faQythan has nithertc 

the "octrine that virtue, in its elementary form, consists in benevo- : 
' lence. and that all forms of virtuous action are modifications of this principle. ! 
Aft; 'this view of ' - _ .ikes up the questions of 

Fracti oment and Per* 

1 in their relation : Benevolence, aiming at a solution 0* the proolems of 
right and wrong upon this simple principle. 

f :': : c ': ••; ■■■:: poei -y :M. on receipt of price. 





SV.::,» 






Sheldo?i db Company's Text-Hooks. 



SHAW'S NEW SERIES 

ON 

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



Shwj's Yeu History of EnylisJ and American Lit- 
erature. This book Las been prepared with the 
greatest care by Prof. Truman J. Backus, of Vassar College, 
using as a basis' Shaw's Manual, edited by Dr. William Smith. 
The following are the leading features of the boo 1 .. : 

1. It has been put into the modern text-book form. 

2. It is primed in large, elear type. 

3. Many pans of the book, which Were not very clear, have been entirely 
rewritten. 

4. The history of r/reat Atithors is marked by the use of larger-sized 
type, which indicates'to the scholar at once the important names in Englibh 
and American literature. 

5. It also contains diagrams, showing the easiest way to classify and 
retnember the eras in English literature. We believe that this is the best 
text -booh on this important subject ever offered to the American 
public. 

II. 

Shaw's Specimens of American Literature, and 
Literary Reader. Greatly Enlarged. Bv Pro? Be j 
N. Martin, D.D., L.H.D., Professor in the University of the Cj y 
of New York. 1 vol. 12uio. 

This book contains specimens from all the chief American writer Espe- 
cially those authors who have ijiven tone and character to An erica n 
8t le" e are S ° represented that sch °lar9 may obtain a just idea of th'jir 

hJZL 52?? Af ** . RE :* n EK for use in onr Higher Seminaries, it is 
believed that no superior book can be found. 

III. 

Shaiv's Choice Specimens of English Literature. 

A Companion Volume to the New History of Literature. Selected 
m° m H\ e £ mef En £ llsh writers, and arranged chronological lv bv 
Thos. B. Shaw and Wm. Smith, LL.D. Arranged and enlarged 
for American students by Benj. N. Martin, LTD., L.H.D., Prof, 
of Philosophy and Logic in the University of the City of New 
York. 1 ,-ol. large 12mo. 

'11 continue to publish 
plete Manual of Enylish and American 

(literature. By Tnos. B. Shaw, M.A., Wm. Smith, LL.D., 
author of Smith's Bible and Classical Dictionaries, and Prof. 
Henry T. Tuckerman. With copious notes and illustrations. 
1 vol. large 12mo, 540 pp. 




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